The Science of Success Podcast

View Original

Jay Abraham: Growing A Business With No Money Or Customers

Lace Gilger
See this content in the original post

In this interview we show you how to grow a business with no capital, no product and no service. You will discover how to train yourself to spot outrageous business opportunities surrounding you in everyday life and we give you the strategies for building trust with your ideal clients and business partners. We ask what does it take to become GREAT? In your career, job, business, partnering, relationships we look at exactly how you can achieve greatness in the key areas of your life. All of this and much more with our guest the legendary Jay Abraham.

Jay Abraham is founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc., and is recognized as one of the world’s most successful marketing strategists, business innovators, entrepreneurial advisors, and masters of revenue acceleration. He has spent the last 30+ years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide.

  • How do you grow a company with no capital, product, or service?

  • What does it mean to mine, monetize and maximize relational capital?

  • Whatever your resource impediment or impairment is, someone else has that and you just have to figure out how to ethically leverage it

  • How Jay created 1.5mm in less than 6 months by finding arbitrage between products, services, and audiences

  • Find “strategic investors” - who else benefits from your growth? Complementary or related products, companies that benefit and naturally grow when you grow - and demonstrate to them that your growth is beneficial for them too - and then get them to help you.

  • How do you build trust in a business relationship? How do you get someone to introduce you to all of their clients?

    • Trust - integrate trust building into your behavior

    • Prove your product / service and it’s performance

    • Denominate what that performance should look like, and how it’s measurably superior to what’s out there

    • Show that your performance has an economic value / profit enhancement for the person you’re pitching

    • Find 2-3 companies that are willing to be your guinea pigs / beta testers - do a pilot with them first (potentially funded by an investor)… (then leverage this case study to sell more people)… and give them an extra incentive / bonus for making the introduction

    • The best way to get someone behind your product, service, business proposition etc is to PROVE to them that it performs - PROVEN PERFORMANCE is huge.

  • Before you expend a ton of capital and time on a project - try to get some validation. The only validation that counts is dollars spent, not what a focus group thinks.

  • How to easily validate your business ideas without taking risk on the front end.

  • There’s a huge amount of IP that’s available to license from places like the Navy, the government, etc

  • Find “parallel universes” that aren’t competitive and plug those opportunities in.

  • Never put anything at risk until you’ve de-risked and validated your product, service, or business model

  • What happens when a typical business is STUCK? Figure out what you’re stuck with.

    • In ANY category of expertise that are people who are super expensive on the top end, but there are many many people who are not at full capacity who are still

    • Make a list of 15 potential consults, and give them all the same pitch

    • I have this challenge, if we can quantify the result of the improvement, and turn the fixed expense into a performance based expense - you can achieve and fund any change in your business

  • How can you unlock an “unlimited business checkbook” to fund ANY problem within your business?

  • How someone got paid $1mm and a free Porsche to buy a Porsche dealership with creative deal making

  • Jay’s skillset comes from 2 key things

    • Tons of diverse experiences - so he can see so many different combinations, permutations and options

    • Bringing to an industry the approaches that no one else can see from other industries - the one eyed man in the land of the blind

  • Spend time traveling outside whatever you do and whatever you’re interested in. Study other businesses, study how other products and services market, how they sell, study topics that are outside your domain of knowledge.

  • How to train yourself to spot outrageous business opportunities lying around you in everyday life.

  • How you can make the “money connection” - you don’t need to be brilliant, but you have to have the right “sensors” turned on - and they only turn on when you broaden your understanding of what’s possible

  • What is Greatness? And why do so many people fall short of it?

  • Everyone has the ability to be great - and everyone wants to be great.

  • 98% of people are mediocre - yet they want to be great - WHY?

  • What does it take to become GREAT? In your career, job, business, partnering, relationships - how you can achieve greatness in the key areas of your life.

  • There are 4 keys to achieving greatness:

    • #1 - Get a context of what greatness ACTUALLY looks and feels like. Take the time to understand what greatness looks like and feels like. In your brain, in your experiences, in your life.

    • #2 - Reconcile yourself to where you actually ARE today on the continuum / spectrum of greatness today. You have to know the GAP from where you are to where you want to be.

    • #3 - Figure out the different strategies and options to get you from where you are to where you want to be - figure out the pros, cons, nuances, etc of each different strategy and find the best one for you. A one size fits all dress doesn’t fit most people well.

    • #4 - “The Log Jam” Theory - Usually one category is gonna have more ultimate impact in opening up the positive flow in all the areas - focus on fixing that log jam first.

    • #5 - Understand that it's a process and it takes time. You need support and compassion, coaching, mentors etc. It’s like a kid trying to walk or talk for the first time, it takes TONS of time to gain proficiency in ANYTHING. You need someone to believe in you, be there for you, and hold you responsible.

    • The first time you try to do ANYTHING - you’re gonna screw it up. Your success chances are almost zero.

  • With every improvement in greatness there is an exponential increase in quality and outcome - not a linear increase.

  • Most breakthroughs don’t come from WITHIN an industry - they come from OUTSIDE it.

  • Homework: Be curious, ask people questions, dig into how other businesses and industries do business.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

Media

Videos

Books

See this content in the original post

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this interview, we show you how to grow a business with no capital, no product and no service. You will discover how to train yourself to spot outrageous business opportunities that are surrounding you in everyday life. We’ll give you the strategies for building trust with your ideal clients and business partners. We ask what does it take to become great in your career, job, business, parenting, relationships and more. We look at exactly how you can achieve greatness in all of the key areas of your life. We discuss this and much more with our guest, the legendary Jay Abraham.

I was recently closing a big software deal and I was thinking about how the lessons and themes from the Science of Success have been so valuable to me as an investor and business owner. I realized that I'm leaving a lot of value that I could be creating for you, the listeners on the table. I believe that many of the things that we teach on the Science of Success are some of the biggest and most important business success factors today.

To that end, we're launching a new Science of Success segment focused on business. These episodes will air every other Tuesday and will not interrupt your regularly scheduled Science of Success programming. Everything we teach on the show can be applied to achieving success in your business life. Now we're going to show you how to do that, along with some interviews of the world's top business experts. With that, I hope you enjoy this business-focused episode of the Science of Success.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter", that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we had one of the absolute living legends of psychology on the show. We discussed the greatest unanswered questions in psychology, the biggest thing people miss understand about flow, what advice young people can take away from our previous guest’s incredible career and what he thinks the absolute biggest takeaways from his own research about flow. All of this and much more with our previous guest, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If you want to learn about flow from the researcher who pioneered the entire field, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Jay. Please note, this episode contains profanity.

[0:03:19.0] MB: Today, we have another legendary guest on the show, Jay Abraham. Jay is the Founder and CEO of the Abraham Group and is recognized as one of the world's most successful marketing strategists, business innovators, entrepreneurial advisors and masters of revenue acceleration. He spent the last 30 plus years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom line of over 10,000 clients and more than 400 industries worldwide. Jay, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:45.7] JA: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it. My pleasure.

[0:03:48.5] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. I'm a huge fan of you and your work and I can't wait to dig into some of the key themes and ideas from your massive body of work and success.

[0:04:00.1] JA: Okay. Let's go at it then.

[0:04:01.7] MB: One of the most fascinating things to me about you is your ability to think laterally and approach problems from a completely different perspective than most people. I want to start with a big question, but it's a question that in many ways your work has addressed in many different ways, which is this idea of how does somebody grow a business if they don't have any money, or they don't have any resources, or they don't have any customers and they feel stuck, or they feel they can't get to the next level because of a lack of X?

[0:04:34.8] JA: It's a great question. It's certainly a broad one. I'll give you a spectrum of answers, okay? There's going to be three scenarios. What you want to do, but you don't really have product service or capital, the way to do it is through strategies that the macro we call is just mining, monetizing, maximizing, managing other people's relational capital. What it means is if you are very, very pragmatic, you can identify that whatever your problem is, whatever your resource impediments as someone else in some other business, or in the same intended business, has what you want and you can basically identify that your ability to achieve that could actually be the fulfillment of a problem, or an opportunity that other person doesn't have.

For example, you might say I've got a product, but I have no distribution and I want to reach heads of IT departments and doesn't matter the industry. Pick an industry. You can find people who have already sold products or services to that decision-maker who have nothing else to sell, but spend an enormous amount of time building goodwill, trust the relationship. If you showed them that they have a sunk cost in that relationship and then you are able to demonstrate proof to them, the value, the qualitativeness, the performance capability of your product or service, you go to them and you ask them to either introduce or outright sell that product to you.

If you needed an office that you didn't have in a city and you had no money, you find somebody else that sells to a similar target audience who has underutilized capacity and you make a deal to sub-office with them. We've done this with tradeshow booths, we've done this with skill sets, we've done this with people who had advertising capability. We've done this with platforms, we've done this with media. That is one way to do it.

Another way to do it which I did one time and we made someone a million and a half dollars in six months as you go to some of the more popular categoric areas of search, you don't go to the first page, you go to the second or third and down and you start finding what I call arbitrage. You find somebody who's got a book that he or she doesn't have a seminar. You find somebody who has a seminar, but doesn't have a book. You can find somebody who has a book and/or a seminar, but doesn't have coaching. You tie all that up, you put it altogether, you take a piece of that. That's another way.

Other ways, you find somebody very successful in a category that does not have the desire to expand nationally or internationally and you set an arrangement, where they let you use basically their IT for either a royalty, or for a percentage. I mean, I can go on and on and on and on. We have a whole book that is called How to Get the Money for Your Great Idea or Startup and What to Do If You Can't. It goes through all the alternatives to capital. Capital impairment is not a reason you shouldn't grow.

There's always going to be somebody. Also, you can go to people that have a business and they have a product or service line, but they do not have certain products, or services that are natural purchases by that same target audience before, during or after that person buys from them. Go to them and say, “I want to create that kind of a business addition and I will operate it through your business. You will market it, because you've already got the clientele and we will split whatever way you want.” I can go on and on and on, but there's a multitude of ways you can do it.

If you have a product or a service and it has been validated, but you want to grow more, first thing that you do is identify what I call strategic investors, people who would benefit more by you being more successful than even you. It could be a product service that would be purchased right after, during. Or it could be a company that if you got large enough, they would like to absorb you. You then figure out how to demonstrate to them predictable, expanded demand. We do that sometimes.

I had a consult, an accidental consult the other day. A gentleman has got a technology using very complex LiDAR technology to identify snow in the mountains and extrapolate what that will mean in the spring and summer to water, to the water management companies. He's trying to raise six million dollars, but he doesn't know how. I explained to him that the easiest way to raise money is to go to a 100 or 200 water management, I guess directors. Show them what you can do, show them what it could mean, demonstrate and correlate the value, either savings time, predictability, budgetary advantage and get them to give you what is called a contingent purchase order. Meaning that if you can do this by such-and-such a time at such-and-such a price and it will prove it can do such-and-such an outcome, we will buy it. If you have 50 or a 100 of those, it's a lot easier to get invest your money. I can go on and on, but there's a couple.

[0:10:09.8] MB: Those are great. I want to drill down on the first example, or one of the most basic examples of this idea of relational capital. Let’s go with what you said. Let's say I have a product or service, I'm selling it to IT managers. I go and approach people who are selling to IT managers already, but selling something that's a complimentary, related product to mine. How do I go about building trust with those people, convincing them, “Hey, you should introduce my product to your client and insert me into your client relationship.”

[0:10:42.6] JA: Well, trust is created many ways. First of all from a clinical standpoint and I'll be happy to provide you with some of this if you want to share it with your audience. There are experts in soft skills. Stephen M.R. Covey, the son of Stephen R. Covey is the preeminent leader and the master at business trust building. There's 13 characteristics that if you can incorporate those into your being, they give you something like 300% more probability at success.

The first thing I'd say is integrate all the characteristics of trust building authentically into your being; that's one. Number two is proof demonstration and pre-emptive overcoming of predictable concerns is the second way. You've got to prove first of all that your product or service performs. Second, you've got to be able to nominate what that performance should look like and how that performance is measured, either tangibly, or intangibly superior to what's out there. Third, you've got to show that that performance has some either economic value in profit enhancement, productive value in either more effectiveness, or more savings, reduced personnel, more reliability. You've got to be able to do that first.

Second, nobody wants to be the first in. You've got to find two or three companies that are willing, or organizations depending on the product or service, willing to basically be your experimental guinea pigs. You've got to basically invest in them. Usually if you can get an investor and ask him or her just to fund the pilot applications, what I normally do is get the guinea pig beta testers some kind of a participatory bonus. If it works and they are authentic and not inaccurate, as long as they're not manipulative and scamming. If it works and they will be our validators, our testimonials, we give them either – and it's fully disclosed, we give them either a percentage of the revenue equity, some consideration or services for three years grant. Something that is worthwhile to them, but not covert. That's another way to do it.

I mean, I always believe that the best way to get somebody passionately and what's the word I want to use? Unhedgingly strongly behind your product, your service, your business proposition, is to prove to them it performs. Many people don't really grasp that. Daymond John who I've done stuff with, wrote a book. It was called The Power of Broke. He was talking about how when people come to him trying to talk about garments they want to put to market, he says, “Take it to a flea market. Open your trunk in a shopping center mall parking lot, see if people will buy it just as it is. If they won't buy it there, they're not going to buy it anywhere.” Prove to yourself first of all.

A lot of people don't understand. They get all excited about a concept that the market isn't excited about. I always recommend before you expand an enormous amount of energy, time, opportunity cost, your own or other’s capital, try to get some true validation. Validation is of two kinds, if you ask people, it's the idea of a – what do they call it when you go and you query a group? My brain is at a gap right now.

[0:14:31.8] MB: Market testing, or market surveys.

[0:14:33.6] JA: I think it was the word for it. When they tell you they like it or don't like it, that isn't necessarily a truism, because they aren't being asked to vote with their credit cards, or their checkbooks, or their purchase orders. The only vote that counts is if somebody is willing to commit. The only truth that counts is if the product or service is able to perform. Performance is a very relative concept. To some people, performance is a great feeling. To some people, it's how they look. To some people, it's just the knowledge that you've got the top of the line, even if it doesn't have.

I'm not sure that a Mercedes at 50 grand outperforms a different car that's not as prestigious at 50 grand, but there's certain value. If you have to know and you have to validate before you make a huge commitment that you can't take back. Because if you blow the commitment, you blow your trust with investors, you blow your trust with industry, you blow your own self-esteem, unless you have a very, very, very strong character and belief.

I always believe in proving before you try to expand. It's a little slower. The power of having documented evidence, the power of having contingent commitments, the power of having a partner who's willing to try it if another investor will at least fund the beta version, the ability to quantify what its performance or benefit, or savings or attributes are gives you a lot stronger advantage than just the radical excitement about the product or service. I don't know if that helps or not.

[0:16:19.9] MB: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I want to dig down a little bit more about this concept of validation. What are some of the ways that you validate, or experiment, or test ideas and how do you do that without spending a huge amount of time, energy or money?

[0:16:36.4] JA: Well, legalities you have to check out, because they've changed. It used to be you could dry test. I think you still can do a variation of it, where you can literally go to a market with some offering. It can be online, offline, and just describe what it is, describe what it does, describe how it does it, describe the implication, describe when it'll be ready and ask for expressions of interest. That's first stage.

If you don't get any, that's probably a tell, don't you think? If you get them, then you have to explain to them and you can incorporate into your first stage communication the pricing and performance, or you can wait. Then you basically explain and then you try to go from that to a contingent commitment, to either purchase it when it's available, to test it for you and apply it as a pilot, if it's available. Or to even if that's really that promising to co-fund it for you for them with an understanding that they will get a share of future sales outside, if that's applicable. That's one way to do it.

By the way, people don't realize this; I do work with one of the big contracting companies to the Navy War College. There are an enormous amount of technological IP that's available for licensing that's out there. I'm sure every category of government – Jet Propulsion Laboratories have it. Somebody we know from Livermore Laboratory licensed something. I mean, there's so much out there.

Also, you could model anything anybody does and say, “Okay, is there a parallel universe that would apply to that's not competitive?” If the answer is yes, you can go to that company and say, “I would like to take everything you do and translate it to X industry.” It's not competitive at all, but I think I could create a meaningful business or cash flow from it and I will share with you on X type of it.

I mean, when people are stymied, the reason they're stymied is not their fault. I have a very wonderful privilege. I've been involved in over a thousand industries and an incalculable number net of scenarios, strategies, business models, business challenges, competitive advantage creation, value added, ancillary business, repurposing, lead generating, sourcing, positioning advantage, ancillary income. When you have the a broader swath of comprehension of maybe not all, but of let's say quantum times more of what's possible, the idea of being frustrated, or seemingly impaired, or not being able to do something, or thinking I don't have an idea, or I don't have a product, or I don't have the skill, or I don’t have the money, the other thing is there's always out there the relative skillsets that you need.

We did years ago a training program on how to be a contingent marketing consultant. We identified the three or four categories. One are the people who are able to sell the concept to the entrepreneur business, to owner of professional media organization. The other is the ability to basically deliver it. The other is the ability to just manage it. We said there are those types everywhere. There are sales people out there who would love to own an equity and a business but they don't A, have the capital, nor do they have the mental construct.

There are people who are really good operators who would never be able to sell anything and they'd love to be in business, but they can't sell. If you find these people and you put them together and you start hard so that you don't jeopardize anybody's security. I always believe that the first thing you do is never put anything and anyone at risk until you validate it. Some people jump right in and I think that's admirable, but I think it's very wise to try to at least get some validation of assumptions. I'm just saying it's infinite. There's just so many things you can do.

[0:21:00.3] MB: Tell me a little bit more about this idea of [inaudible 0:21:02.8], power partnering, etc., for a skill set or capacity and maybe some examples of people who've done that in the past.

[0:21:10.8] JA: Well, let's take a look at a typical business that is operating, but not opted stuck, okay? They could be stuck with lack of knowledge. They don't know how to market well. They don't know online. They don't have good technology. They don't have systems. They don't have maybe good production. They don't have good channel management. They don't have good distribution control. All of those are skill sets that people sell, right?

Consultants, experts, advisers, most of them sell it by either the hour or the monthly fee, or project. What people don't realize is that in any category of expertise, there are people like myself and I'm very expensive and there are people that are let's say, ordinary, general experts and they're fairly priced, but it's very rare that everyone is fully utilized, that everyone has every hour of their time consumed. If you identify not one, but maybe 15 and you go to them down the line and say, “I have this challenge. If we can quantify what your contribution can mean to it, either an increased revenue, savings, productivity, any denomination that can be converted to me paying you, I will pay you X for Y amount of time in exchange for you investing your expertise.” Now you've turned a fixed expense to a variable, right?

[0:22:37.7] MB: Yeah, that's great.

[0:22:39.0] JA: We do it all the time. We have a concept that I call the unlimited business checkbook. The concept is within about 90% of the categories of impairment, resource impairment, economic impairment, IP impairment, capital, and there's many derivatives of capital; human, relational, intellectual impairment, you can overcome almost all that with a strategic alliance with the power of partnering, with the relational capital move or maneuver.

Then there's a whole other side of it. It's control. It's getting access – having access to people's assets. In other words, you might find that you get access to somebody's buyers and then you can do it with lots of those somebodies in the same field all over and you can have a back-end or a front-end. Just an example that's fascinating and it's very simple one, in the home improvement business, people don't realize it. You have a home, right? You have a house?

[0:23:39.6] MB: I do.

[0:23:40.6] JA: Have you done any improvement to it?

[0:23:42.1] MB: I have.

[0:23:42.9] JA: Okay. Typically not always, but there's a very high statistical probability, Matt. If you are going to improve a function or factor in your home, normally the first one is a kitchen, because that's a focal. If you're going to do a kitchen, once that kitchen is transformed and looks majestic, you start contrasting that to the rest of the house and you go, “Oh, crap. I got to fix the bathrooms, then I got to fix the paint, then I got to replace the carpets or the floors, then I got to maybe replace the doors, or the windows, then maybe the roof, maybe the garage door, maybe the landscaping, many all crap. Maybe I should do some stonework and put either a fireplace or a really nice patio, or a pool.”

There's a progression and it doesn't go that expansive, but almost anybody I've ever looked at there's one or two gradients. If you can strike an arrangement with any ethical home improvement company that does one vertical thing and they will share with you not just their buyers, but their non-buyers, the statistical probability of that group of prospective sources being worth a fortune to you is very high. Does that makes sense?

[0:25:05.2] MB: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

[0:25:07.0] JA: I mean, there’s tons. I mean, I've been very blessed to see correlations, implications, anomalies. I've been able to extrapolate to see all these things. I'll tell you some fun stories and these are derivatives of this, but they're very cool. Probably the most interesting thing that I ever heard of, highlight was very cool. There was a man about 20 years ago who loved Porsche automobiles, but he couldn't afford to even buy one, but he loved them.

He found out that a small Porsche dealer was becoming available for purchase in Northern California. Out of curiosity, he applied. He get the paperwork and review it. Upon reviewing, he saw that there was a stipulation in the dealer agreement that a dealer could make a brand-new Porsche available for trial use for up to, I think it was three months and 3,000 miles and it could still be licensed as new. It was a demo. You know what a demo is, right?

[0:26:09.0] MB: Yup.

[0:26:10.0] JA: With that piece of information, he got a wild idea and he ran ads all over Northern California that said, “Drive a brand new Porsche every year for life for a one-time $75,000 investment.” He got about – it cost, I think it was a million dollars he needed for the dealership, but he got 2 million plus from people who came in, because he was able to make these Porsches available to them. Two things happened, they became his greatest referral sources. Half of them didn't really exchange Porsches. They just bought theirs from him at a discount. He created a dealership and he ended up with a with a million dollar plus capital. He had that one point of interest and he had out one point of equity he gave out for doing it, that's a pretty cool concept.

[0:26:56.4] MB: It's incredible. I love those kinds of stories. There's so many from the archives and the war stories that you have. I'd love to hear if another one comes to mind, another example of that really innovative lateral connecting the dots and thinking in a different way.

[0:27:11.7] JA: Yeah. I had a friend, I don't think he's dead. I just don't have contact with him anymore. I was pretty cool. I'll take a couple cool ones that are all true. Years and years ago, he realized that the Rose Bowl, the big stadium that they play the Rose Bowl in that UCLA plays in was not being used, something like three weekends out of the year, except for at key times.

He went. He negotiated with them to get the rights to use it to create a flea market. He knew nothing about flea markets. Once he got the agreement, he went to the biggest operator of formal flea markets in the country and he flipped the agreement to them for a cash upfront and a percentage of all the revenue they got from leasing the flea markets. He got it for I think 20 years. That was pretty interesting. Probably one of the ones everybody loves is Carnival Cruise. You know what that is.

[0:28:11.9] MB: Yup.

[0:28:12.9] JA: A cruise line that’s got – I think they own now five or six other cruise lines. I knew the marketing guy when they started. The man that started Carnival Cruise had one ship. It was a beat-up used ship. The guy was so capital impaired that he could only afford to paint it on one side. He would have to bring it in on the painted side, so that people coming on would see it and it would look at least reasonable. It would go out I think 800 rooms and would go out half full every week.

The man who owned it had a brilliant distinction. He realized that every week it was going out half empty. Those 400 rooms at that time were worth $800 a week. That's $320,000 worth of buying power down the drain. He got my friend who is now deceased, but my friend who was the marketing manager to go to every radio station, television station, publication and trade them credit for use on Carnival Cruise in exchange for advertising. He actually let them have two years to use their credit, but he used his right now.

His credits drove all kinds of paid cash people. When anybody from the media used their credits, which he absolutely made possible, but a lot of the media used it as gifts to their employees, bonuses, gifts to their clients. A lot of the clients would buy second and third rooms, so they got cash even on the utilization of the credits. When anyone redeemed the credits, the owner of carnival would charge a $39 surcharge. That charge covered the incremental cost of the cold cuts for the buffet, the sheets. Most of them were three-day cruises. He made money from the excursions, from the gambling. That's how he built Carnival Cruise.

The guy that started home shopping and then QVC modeled it was a guy that had a very unsuccessful radio station in a small city in Florida. He literally, very fascinating, couldn't sell advertising, so he would trade to merchants for merchandise. He had all this merchandise and he had to get rid of it. Every Saturday, he would do four or five hours of literally an on-air auction to sell all the electric can openers and all the hair dryers and all the pots and pans that he had. That was the genesis. He started making so much money that he started buying the same timelines and bunches of other radio stations and then he moved it to television stations. Man, go on and on and on and on.

There was a company in Australia, very fascinating. There was a law that you could not do building advertising on the outside of a building downtown, because of aesthetics. There was a guy that was very brilliant. He realized that you could put an ad on the inside of a ground-level window. He bought the rights to do that in an enormous number of buildings, then he went to the big outdoor advertising company and he sold his rights to them for a big fee, plus a piece of all the future advertising. I can go on and on.

[0:31:51.9] MB: It’s incredible.

[0:31:53.4] JA: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a way of thinking. I've got that classic story that people, your group won't be as aware of this, but the story is pretty cool. Years and years ago, an insurance company called ColonialPenn started out with a focus of trying to create group policies, going to organizations, going to associations, going to unions. They were struggling. They were having a lot of trouble breaking in.

After a couple of years of mediocre performance, one of the very brilliant, brilliant, brilliant directors said, “Let's look at this differently. If we cannot sell a client, a group, why don't we start our own?” They started an organization called the American Association of Retired People, AARP, so they would have a client. Now AARP has something like 16 or 20 million members, it's a huge revenue source, it's a viable big, big company and it produces – Well, they had to divest themselves after about 20 years, because they had a monopoly. ColonialPenn made billions of dollars from it. I can go on and on. It's a way of thinking, Matt.

[0:33:07.7] MB: How do you start to train yourself to think that way, to see these gaps and opportunities that are all around us that seem invisible to most people and yet, someone can just pluck an empty parking lot or an empty stadium and turn it into a million dollar deal?

[0:33:24.8] JA: Well, I'll tell you how I am able to do it and I'll tell you how I've tried to get other people to do it. My skill set comes from two distinctions; one, I've had so many diverse experiences that I can see possibilities, applications, correlations, combinations that I think most people do not get the chance, because they're very vertical in their life experiences. What I've done is two things and not commercial crafts. We've created programs we sell occasionally, not often, that give them this broad spectrum. They have a context.

What I tell the most people is spend time traveling outside whatever you do, whatever you're interested in. Study how other businesses industries operate, study other areas of interest, study how other people market, study other products service offers, get all your friends and your neighbors and your relatives to send you all the promotional stuff that they get from whatever they're interested in, whatever they're signed up on, whatever their industry is.

On Saturdays if you live in a decent city, go to the convention hotels and walk around. There's normally 10 or 15 different events going on. Ask the people at the door if you can walk in for hour watch and expand your horizon. Start learning what you don't know, because that's where your opportunity lies. In business itself, very candidly, my skill has always been bringing to an industry that which no one else in the industry has ever been exposed to. It's the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I would just borrow success approaches from all kinds of outside industries, combine them and then introduce them to an industry where everybody is doing the same thing the same way. My client gets outrageous advantage, because nobody else thinks that way.

It's a thought process that has to be cultivated. One time, we did a program that we called how to think differently. Actually, it was called do something different. Every week for 13 weeks, we gave an assignment to the people. Very simple. First assignment was somewhat like this, whatever your regimen or protocol is Matt, when you awaken in the morning; you get up, almost everybody has to go to the bathroom, that's natural. Then you have a sequence you normally follow. Maybe you take a shower, maybe you turn on the coffee, maybe you watch CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg, then maybe you read a paper. Then you get dressed.

Then if you don't work at – you work at home, you go to your computer and you go on Facebook, or you go to whatever you do. Or if you go to work, you probably take either a service, could be an Uber, can be train, bus, or you take the fastest, most expedient form of transportation, the highway. We would say change your regimen for a week. Get out, but obviously if your bladder is full, go to the bathroom, but do everything else different.

If you'd normally have coffee first, take a shower first. If you normally get dressed last, get dressed first. If you normally read the paper last, read it in the middle. If you normally drive down the highway, drive down the side streets and force yourself to break your pattern. I had lots of things like that we did. It was very profound, because the way that you turn on your receptors and your sensors is to break your rigidity, if that makes sense. We don't even know we have rigidity.

[0:37:11.9] MB: That totally makes sense. Start stepping outside of our daily routines and rituals and also borrow broad-based knowledge from different industries and topics and places and cultivate a broad set of thinking skills, so that you can really start to see things in a different perspective than other people see them.

[0:37:32.3] JA: Yeah. You don't have to be brilliant to see what I call making the money connection. You have to have the right sensory capability. The sensors are only going to turn on as you broaden your understanding of what's possible. I forced myself. I've been very blessed. It's a little bit challenging, but my consulting practice has never been vertical. I've never done one industry, or one category. I take on any industry, any problem that is within the realm of revenue generation, competitive. I don’t do operations and I don't do technology, because it's not my skillset.

Anything else, I usually have enough historic understanding, empirical experience and capacity to adapt, adopt, extrapolate to take it on. If you don't have anything like that, hoping and praying is not the way to do it. Force yourself to be interested in that which is never fascinated you before.

There's a great book that is out recently. It's called Range. It makes the case that in our society today that there are generalists, there are specialists and then there are synthesis. The people that will own and rule the business world are the synthesis, because they have the diverse capability of handling all the new challenges that have no historic precedent. Specialists only have what they know historically. Generalists, worse. Synthesis have this broad spectrum of understanding of so many possibilities they can draw from.

[0:39:19.9] MB: Funnily enough, we and we'll throw this in the show notes for listeners, but we actually interviewed David Epstein, the author of Range a couple weeks ago in this.

[0:39:27.9] JA: He’s really good?

[0:39:28.7] MB: Yeah, he was awesome. I'll shoot you a link to the interview too.

[0:39:32.2] JA: I’d like that, because in fact, if you'd let me, I'll send it out to my list, because it might be very useful. I thought that was – it was a little bit deep psychological. If you get through the depth of it, I thought the message was powerful, didn't you?

[0:39:46.3] MB: Oh, it was amazing. Well, the funny thing is that this is full circle, because I think when we were hanging out in Laguna Beach, you actually told me about Range. Then I was like, “Oh, this book sounds really interesting.” I bought it and read it and then I was like, “This guy is amazing. We got to get him on the podcast.” We interviewed David and now you get to listen to the interview, so that's pretty funny.

[0:40:09.9] MB: Want to hear a crazy statistic? Every eight seconds, somebody is hired off of LinkedIn Jobs. As a business owner, I know how hard it is to hire good people. I want to use every tool available to me to get the absolute best talent for the job. That's why I'm a big fan of our sponsors this week, LinkedIn Jobs.

LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you're looking for, so you can hire the right person quickly. You can look for all kinds of things, whether it's adaptability, collaboration, creativity. You can look way beyond a flat, one-dimensional resume and work skills and connect with the candidates who are going to be a perfect cultural and business fit for your company.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that's linkedin.com/success to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[0:41:22.0] MB: Changing gears a little bit, tell me about greatness. How do you think about greatness, what is it and how do people sometimes fall short in their pursuit of it?

[0:41:32.5] JA: Well, I mean, I have a really interesting, I guess I'd call it a character flaw. I get very excited about a concept for a period of time and I develop it and I explore it and I explain it, then I jettison it off. Somebody said I'm like a intellectual, what do you call it? Gigolo, because I'll have a concept, take it to my room for the night, I have my intellectual way with it and then throw it out in the morning.

A couple years ago, I got very deeply interested in the concept of greatness. I haven’t really revisited it for a while, so this will be fun. I got to dust off the intellectual cobwebs. My conclusion was this; with little exception, every human being is programmed in our DNA to want to be great, unless you have some mental affliction, or physical affliction, or birth defect. You really want to be great. You want to be a great entrepreneur, if that’s your calling, manager, leader, team member. You also want to be a great friend, if you have children, father, you have significant other, whether it's lover or partner. You want to be great at whatever you do as far as hobbies.

Yet, more than the vast, something like 98% of people are mediocre at – there’s eight or seven categories identified. The question is why? Why is somebody who definitely and maybe not desperately, but inherently wants to not be – you don't come home at the end of a day from work, whether you're leading, following, managing and say to yourself, “Self, I went and spent eight or 10 hours and I did a mediocre job.” You don't go out selling and come back and say, “I was really crappy today.” You don't go to your loved one and say, “Honey, I did a really shitty job today. I didn’t do well. I didn't contribute well. I didn't perform well. I didn't advance any attributes in my job.” You don't come home and purposely be boring, or uninterested, or non-contributing. Let your kids run awry. You don't purposely be a crappy friend. Yet, sadly if you look at it, the vast majority people are exactly that in every category.

I ask myself why and what does it take to change. Very delightful and this might be a great conclusion to our discussion for today, I came up with four very wonderfully clear-cut answers. If you can squarely reconcile yourself to them, you can transform yourself in any or all of these eight or so categories.

The first reason that people are not great in any of these categories, career, job, business, relationship, parenting, friendship, skillset, is that nobody really takes the time to help them see what greatness looks like, both in your brain as executed, as expressed and then what it is like validated when it's received by the other side. It's not that hard. If you don't have no reference model, how are you going to get there? Just accidentally? If I say, “Okay, I'm going to go climb Mount Everest.” You have no reference model of how to do it, how not to asphyxiate, or get oxygen deprivation, how to do it, strengthen yourself, how to do it in phases, you think you're really going to do it? Think about it. No.

First thing is getting a context of what greatness looks like in any and all these categories. Second, maybe five areas is reconciling yourself to where you are on the continuum against that. You know what it's supposed to look like. Now you got to say, “Okay, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a manager, as a team member, as a friend, as a partner, as a lover, as a parent, as a hobbyist, as a rock climber, as a here where I am on the continuous.” You have to know what I'll call is the gap, because it's basically you're looking at personal performance arbitrage really, isn't it? You're looking at the gap.

There's another word for it and I'll think of what it is. Then you've got to basically figure out what are the different options to get me in each category from here to there. You got to understand what they are, what they require, the pros and cons of each. Because all one size never fits all in anything, but not even close. If you see a woman wearing a one-size-fits-all dress, one woman looks really hot, the rest it's either too tight and ugly, too short, too lose, too long. You got to figure the right strategy in each category to achieve your goal the safest, the fastest, the easiest, the most predictable.

Then and this is where it gets really interesting, I believe in what I call the log jam event theory, Matt. The log jam means you've got maybe these eight categories of let's call of impaired greatness, or greatness deficiency. One of them is going to have more ultimate impact in opening up the positive flow of the rest and all the rest. If you've got a terrible relationship in your personal life, you probably are not going to be able to achieve, realize, manifest greatness than anything else. Does that make sense?

[0:47:27.3] MB: Totally.

[0:47:27.9] JA: You got to figure where the log jam is first. That may seem divergent, but it's actually very strategically astute, because once you relieve all that diversionary emotion and energy dissipation, now you can re-shift it to all the other areas and then you've got to be able to go, “What's my first imperative, second impairment, third impairment.” Imperative. Excuse me, not – and well, it could be impairment and imperatives. Then you systematically, once you've identified the strategy, you work through it. Now that's the second or the third category. I believe you're married and have children, don't you Matt?

[0:48:08.3] MB: That's right.

[0:48:08.9] JA: Okay. How old are your children?

[0:48:11.7] MB: I have an 18-month-old and basically a newborn.

[0:48:14.2] JA: Perfect. Okay. As or when, I don't know, because I can't remember. My children are all adults now, they start walking, trying to talk, trying to eat, trying to poop, trying to walk talk, eat. What else would they be doing? They're not ready to ride a bike yet. Walk, talk, eat, poop, speak, lots of the same thing.

Usually in the beginning, they are not very effective and they fail. When they try to walk, they fall over. When they’re trying to poop, they miss the spot or they can't quite get out of their diaper. When they're trying to eat, the spoon may go in their eye, or their hair, or their chest, but it very rarely initially goes into their mouth. It were it not for the parent being their champion, their advocate, their fan, their coach, their mentor and putting them, standing them back up, putting the spoon back in the right place, taking them and sitting them on the toilet, even though they miss. They go, [Inaudible 0:49:13.9]. That’s great. Then repeating certain things, so they have a better reference, they would never gain proficiency, would they?

[0:49:23.5] MB: No.

[0:49:24.3] JA: Same thing in this. You need to be able to – because the first time you try to execute anything that you might understand intellectually, the statistical probability is you will F it up big time transaction. You need someone to believe in you, what I call a sword and a shield. Can be a mentor, coach, a support person. Somebody that is going to hold not only you responsible, but going to be there for you throughout the transitional process until you achieve, if not mastering a level of greater proficiency.

What happens in all these eight areas is it's not linear. With each level of improvement and progression, the glory, the wonderment, the ecstasy of this is asymmetric. It keeps multiplying exponentially, so you keep growing and your ability growing and your quality growing and your proficiency growing and you're loving that's growing and your bonding with your family growing and your parenting and levels that you can't even imagine, until and unless you go through that. Does that help?

[0:50:41.1] MB: Yeah, that's great. Such a good break down. The point about how the first time you do anything, you're almost guaranteed to fail. Yet so many people try something once, beat themselves up and then give up.

I know we're running out of time. One question we like to ask everybody as a wrap up is for listeners who want to take action on something we've talked about today, it could be any of the topics or themes, what would be one action item that you would give them as a next step to start implementing some of these ideas in their lives?

[0:51:12.1] JA: I'll give you a couple suggestions. It's not meant to be self-aggrandizing. We have a website that as of today it's going to be changed. Right now, you don't even have to opt-in and it's got an enormous amount of stuff on it that doesn't sell anything. Again, you can get it take leave your name, your e-mail. There's a whole collection of stuff on it for be up being preeminent. There's a whole collection of stuff on greatness. There's a document called The Abraham Mindshift Challenge. There are two videos on relational capital. I would encourage people to get them. Or if you want to get the files and put them on your site, I have no problem with that. It doesn't matter. We're not doing them to monetize it. That's the first thing.

Second is start committing yourself in terms of non-linear thinking, to start every day when you meet somebody from another domain, ask them questions, learn about what they do, how they do it, how they monetize, how they operate, what they read. Ask them if they would forward to you some of the things they read. Start going online and just randomly visiting things you're not interested in.

Every time you do that, make a note of one distinction that you gain, that you've never thought about that might have value, or be interesting. Start really looking at biographies of people who are non-linear thinkers. I mean, breakthrough thinking and it's true, there's nothing more than taking elements that are always there and recombining them in new ways.

People like myself, Tony Robbins were not original thinkers. We are original synthesizers. We just take the stuff that's always been there and put them together. Also and this is old, because I have to think about new applications. We used to always talk about the fact that most breakthroughs do not come from the industry you are in. This is just analogy, fiber optics which redefine the whole era of telecommunication did not come from telecommunication. It came from aerospace and was borrowed.

Federal Express built their whole business by using what the Federal Reserve Bank was using, which is called the hub-and-spoke method for clearing checks overnight. The ballpoint pen or roll-on deodorant, one of them borrowed the technique from each other and I can go on and on and on and on, but you'll never get breakthroughs if you don't break out of the rigidity of your limited paradigm. That's why I call it giving yourself a paradigmectomy.

[0:53:50.9] MB: Well Jay, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all this wisdom, all this knowledge. For listeners who want to check you out, find all of your stuff online, obviously we'll put some things in the show notes, where can they find you?

[0:54:06.3] JA: Well, I mean, it depends. If you just want to find the resources, which are there in contributions, Abraham.com. Very easy. Abraham.com. The place to go is the 50 shades site and there's some cool stuff. I think there's 8 or 900 hours of stuff, audio, video and there's thousands of pages. As I said, right now it'll change soon, but there's no opt-in required. Not one item sells anything. If you're serious about a business that's very large and can be grown and you're a serious entrepreneur making serious money, running a serious business and you want it to be seriously better, then there's a way to contact me on the website.

Thank you very much. If you want to do more, I'm happy. I hope this has value and I will be happy to take your interview of Epstein and put on my site and reference you. If you send this to my office, we'll put it out for you to a podcast, okay?

[0:55:00.8] MB: Awesome. Well Jay, thank you so much. We'll definitely follow up on the Epstein interview and we'll let you know when this episode airs. I know you got to get to a meeting, so thank you very much for coming on the show.

[0:55:10.6] JA: My pleasure. Thank you, Matt.

[0:55:12.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps boost the algorithm, that helps us move up the iTunes rankings and helps more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show, links transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.