(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
getting credit and money to start and grow
your business.
And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
I'm super excited you could be here.
Today, we have one of the coolest men
I have ever known in my life, or
gotten to be able to know, from all
of his trainings and teachings throughout my career.
As a matter of fact, he is a
huge motivator that has helped me be able
to grow our business to the size that
it is, and also help teach you a
lot of the methodologies that he's taught me
to be able to help you grow your
business as well.
So with us today, I'm honored to have
Jay Abraham.
Now, Jay is the $50 billion man and
highest-paid marketing consultant, a proven business leader,
and top executive coach in the United States.
Now, as founder and CEO of the Abraham
Group, Jay has spent his entire career solving
complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses.
Now, he has significantly increased the bottom line
of over 10,000 clients in more than
1,000 industries and over 7,200 sub
-industries worldwide.
He has dealt with virtually every type of
business scenario and issue.
He has studied and solved almost every type
of business question, challenge, and opportunity as well.
Now, he has an uncanny ability to identify
hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, underperforming activities, and
undervalued possibilities that others just simply miss.
He has earned him, it has earned him
the respect of business leaders globally.
Now, beyond that, he teaches clients that there
are often more effective and profitable strategies beyond
the single approach their industry typically uses.
He helps them adapt successful concepts from other
industries to gain a competitive edge.
Now, he's renowned as a leading expert in
the areas of permanence, exponential business growth, performance
enhancement, risk reduction, and maximizing business assets.
He's been featured extensively in all types of
major publications, and with his depth of experience,
strategic thinking, and strong communication skills, he is
considered one of the world's foremost experts in
revenue model generation, business model generation, strategic restructuring,
and marketing as well.
Now, he's helped raise the performance of countless
businesses, even in adverse environments, by finding creative,
preemptive solution to very complex problems.
He is dedicated to advancing businesses, careers, and
personal wealth.
Jay, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you.
What a buildup.
That's actually impressive.
It's rare that, I mean, it's probably some
of our PR kit, but it's rare that
anybody does it that extensively.
I'm a little bit blushy, but thank you.
I hope I can live up to the
expectations.
Well, the reality is we could spend the
entire time just talking about your accolades because
you've done so much.
And I want to start by just thanking
you for what you've done for all of
us entrepreneurs.
I don't know, I wonder, do you really
know how much you've touched so many people
out there?
I know your clients, but there's so many
of us out there that you've touched.
Do you realize how many of us that
you've out here in the world that you've
helped?
In truth, it's become a little bit of
a blur.
In my youth, I was very aggressive in
doing seminars and trainings.
And the good news is a lot of
it landed very well with a lot of
people who were younger, who became influencers and
experts, and they've done a very nice job
of perpetuating the methodology, both for themselves and
teaching it in a very ethical manner.
So I have no idea, although I hope
it's extensive because the work that I always
tried to do, Ty, was designed to elevate
people to a much higher level of thinking,
acting, transacting, and contributing to their market.
And if I've succeeded beyond my expectation, that's,
when you get to a certain age, your
legacy value and the impact you can not
have done but can still continue to create
societally and business on a world.
And I've been blessed.
You probably know I've been all over the
world many times.
So it's very interesting.
But no, I mean, it's nice when, I'm
flattered about one thing.
If I travel, it is not uncommon for
people to come up to me from all
over the world in a very joyous and
appreciative way.
I've never had anyone say, you're an asshole,
you stole my money, you ruined our life.
It's fortuitously the opposite.
So it's very gratifying.
But you get to a point where you
just do what you do and you hope
it has not just direct value, but that
people are impacted enough that they share the
belief system, the methodology with as many other
people.
It sounds like you've done it.
So I'm grateful on behalf of myself, the
body of work, and all the people you've
helped.
Thank you.
Well, one of the biggest problems, and I
appreciate that, one of the biggest problems that
I've faced along the way and a lot
of our audience faces and that you're masterful
at fixing are revenue leaks.
Just the revenue that's leaking out of the
business.
So what's your advice for how to identify
the revenue leaks and then plug those leaks?
That's a great question.
If you don't mind, I always will try
to answer the question asked, but I have
a tendency to wanna do a little bit
more context so that the answer has much
more meaning and impact and people act on
it.
So the first thing I would do is
have people understand that a lot of my
early work was on variability.
Variability means you do something one way, it
produces X.
You do it another, it can produce two
X or one half X.
You do another, it can produce multiple X
now, but even more X later.
And it usually takes the same amount of
time, effort, opportunity.
You deal in economic terms.
I don't have my list here.
Brian has it, but we have a list
of something like 40 things that are assets
nobody thinks about it.
Time, effort, interaction, leads, access to the market,
your ad, your follow-up.
We have many proprietary concepts.
One of them is called RSO, Revenue System
Optimization.
It starts before the first mile and it
ends after the first mile.
It looks at every interrelated activity you are
currently engaged in right now on either a
formal basis, informal basis, intermittent basis, episodic basis
to generate your revenue.
First of all, if you do anything formally,
whether you spend money or it's organic, you
are targeting a market.
The question is, is the market you're targeting
the most opportune and are you targeting like
shotgun or rifle?
Is the message you are taking to the
market and the proposition you are providing to
stimulate a response the very best one you
could do that's going to appeal to the
maximum number of the most desirable people?
Are you reducing what's called the hurdle rate,
the risk of starting a relationship?
When you initiate a relationship, depending on whether
it's a lead, whether it's an opt-in,
whether it's a request for some item, resource
document, registration for a webinar, how do you
not just follow up in a conventional and
a herd mentality way, how do you start
from that point and elevate the value of
whatever it is and also bridge it to
the value of whatever you are and whatever
you're offering?
How do you progress somebody through the process?
If they buy one time, do you have
products or services they should be buying continually?
If they buy all you have, is there
other ways to ethically monetize it?
If you don't get the maximum conversion or
revenue yield from what you're doing, why?
And so we start there.
Then at the end of it, we say,
what else could you do with the leads
that don't?
Don't convert the buyers who buy one time
and could buy many, the buyers who buy
all the time but don't buy everything, the
buyers who buy everything and you got nothing
else to sell, what else can you do
if you have distribution channels you're using for
one thing?
Is there a lot of variability amongst the
salespeople?
If one person's five times better than another,
what can you model about that person that'll
make the other salespeople at least 10, 20
% better?
Do you know who excels at what?
Who's better at opening accounts?
Who's better at different kinds of industries or
scenarios?
Who's better at selling different products?
Who's better at holding margin?
Who's better at retention?
I'm giving you just a few of the
things, but it's a starting point.
How did you, out of curiosity, develop and
hone this skill as well as you have
of finding these missed opportunities?
It was totally accidental.
I guess my origin story would help everybody
and I haven't formally, excuse me, or formally
for many, many, many years, I used to
use it as the opening of my training.
So I got started the first, at the
beginning at age 18.
I had two children at 20.
It was very difficult.
I had no formal education and the only
people that would give me opportunity were very
interesting entrepreneurs.
They were qualitative, but they would not give
me a salary.
It was an eat what you kill.
If you produced, you earned.
If you didn't, you didn't.
They could give a flying what about whether
I spent a minute or 18 hours at
whatever I was doing.
All they cared about is delivering revenue and
success or not.
When you only eat when you earn, you
realize what works, what doesn't, what works best.
But I had the very wonderful, retrospectively, it
was miserable at the time since I was
not guaranteed anything.
I had the wonderful ability to be in
five, six different activities concurrently, meaning I could
do hour here, two hours there, whatever it
was.
And as luck would have it, Ty, they
were not in the same industry.
Very important.
After a couple of cycles of this, pardon
me again, and doing about 10 or 15
industries, I made a profound and a life
-shifting realization.
People in one industry do not have a
clue how other people think, act, transact, market,
strategize, source leads, convert leads, communicate, nothing.
And so I was able to take rather
commonplace methodologies, techniques, approaches, concepts from the industries
I'd been in, combine into certain hybrids, apply
them to the new industries I was in.
And we were, like, I was the fair
-haired child.
I was extraordinary.
Entrepreneur Magazine grew 20,000% in a
year and got sold for, this was, I'm
not, yeah, that was Entrepreneur Magazine.
Icy Hot grew more than that in 18
months and got sold for a small fortune.
I got into the newsletter business and all
the newsletters I helped blew up.
I got into the gold brokerage business and
all of them blew up.
Not because I was, they thought I was
brilliant, but just that I understood stuff they
didn't.
And then I was, after I realized the
power of that, I was on a mission.
I was hopelessly curious.
I wanted to learn everything I could about
everything I could.
And then one more overlap, and it's a
complex story, but I'm telling it to you
to answer your question.
I also had the very good fortune, and
I still do, of helping over 300 of
the world's top experts, Tony Robbins' client, David
Johns' client, Brian Tracy I helped, Stephen, late
Stephen Covey, his son, Stephen M.
R.
Covey, Anthony Scaramucci, a co-founder of FedEx,
all kinds of people.
But they mostly came to me not for
help with their methodology.
They came for help to command greater value,
greater economic yield out of their methodology, greater
capability of demonstrating to the market its tangible
value.
But before they could do that, I had
to get a compressed, sort of a short
course on their methodology.
So I understand 300, 400 expertises most people
would never be exposed to.
So you take all the experiences I've had,
now it's over a thousand industries, and it's
real experience.
A lot of people say, I've worked with
150,000 businesses, and it's not a lie,
but it's not necessarily a total truth because
what they've done is present the same message,
say it's a keynote, it's a workshop, but
it wasn't really rolling your sleeves up being
on the front lines of capitalism.
I've spent the majority of my life not
teaching, but doing, and being paid in correlation
to the results I produced.
So my context, my perspective, my worldview is
much different than most theoretical experts.
So I don't know if that helps you,
but that's the answer to the question.
I love that.
Another thing I've seen you talk a little
bit about is geometric growth principles.
So how do you use these to be
able to achieve exponential improvement with revenue and
profit as well?
Well, you have to understand that it's easier
to work on the geometry of a business
than it is doing it linear and incremental.
I always talk about getting out of the
incremental zone and getting into the exponential zone
where everything you do, action, effort, dollar, people,
everything is operating with optimal current and residual
yield.
And you can't do that if you don't
have an understanding of the alternatives available to
you.
But I learned there's two ways to blow
up a business.
One is if you're lucky enough to find
one breakthrough that just kills.
It's a rarity.
It is very difficult, not impossible, but it's
much harder.
The other is to improve many different activities,
10 or 15% each, because people don't
understand that it works on the geometry of
a business.
10 plus 10 plus 10 is 30.
10 times 10 times 10 is 1,000.
So if you have, we created years ago,
Tony Robbins has built the foundation with acknowledgement
of his business mastery program on my 10,
10, 10.
There's three ways to grow a business.
You increase the number of buyers.
You increase the size of the transaction ethically.
You increase the frequency of purchase.
And if you have nothing else to sell,
the utility value means other ethical ways you
can monetize that buyer relationship or even that
prospect relationship.
And if you increase three categories by only
10% each, it's not 10%, it's 33
% when you extend it out.
I won't give you all the math now,
but I'll be happy to give you a
chart you can put up for your people.
If you double your numbers, it's 800%
growth.
So there are very safe, very powerful, very
little understood, and very, very, very highly predictable
ways to grow any business.
I guess you could say exponentially, and even
more so to grow the bottom.
Everyone talks about a 10X moonshot.
And what they're telling you is 10X top
line.
And most people don't understand, to increase your
top line 10X, very, very precarious.
You're gonna normally need a lot more capital,
a lot more people, a lot more marketing,
a lot more infrastructure, a lot more inventory.
And a lot of times it actually diminishes
your margin.
Whereas I probably know 97 categories, not just
ways, but whole categories with multiple techniques and
tactics within each category for multiplying your bottom
line 10X without having to really create the
same kind of a correlation at the top.
In other words, you don't have to double
your top line to multiply your bottom line
many times over.
And that's sort of a secret that most
people don't understand.
And it's interesting, because I see a lot
of entrepreneurs bragging about the top line, when
it's the bottom line that matters.
So you're a master at this.
What are some of the things that are
the hidden assets in a business that are
oftentimes overlooked that if you do address can
actually accomplish 10X or more of the bottom
line?
Well, let's take a look at sunk costs
for a minute.
You have sunk costs in ads you run.
It depends on what you sell.
Those ads produce either a sale or a
lead.
You convert some number of those.
If it's a sale, then is it a
one-time sale?
Is it something that should be multiple?
Are there other products or services people buy
before, during, after instead that could be added
to that sale to double, redouble the profit
each time that they purchase?
Are there ways that you could more powerfully
convert more people from your leads?
Are there a way to monetize the leads
that don't buy your product and get them
to buy something so it recoups your sunk
costs and gives you more money you can
reinvest in marketing?
Are you really understanding the lifetime value of
different categories of buyers?
All buyers aren't worth the same relative investment.
All sources aren't worth the same relative investment.
All ads don't produce buyers that are the
same relative investment.
And until you know, you're either over or
under spending on what you're doing.
Anybody who arbitrarily tie decides they're going to,
if they have paid marketing, advertising, they're gonna
give either a percent or a dollar amount
every month.
Whatever you're deciding, you're either committing too much
or too little.
You should understand three things.
You should understand yield-based thinking.
You should understand allowable acquisition costs.
Allowable acquisition costs means when you know the
relative value, not just on the first sale,
but on predictable repeat sales in a time
period, a year, lifetime, then you only then
do you know how much you can afford
to not spend, but invest to acquire the
first sale or the lead.
A 2D, 3D entrepreneur investor, a 2D is
the typical person out there.
He or she looks at revenue minus expense
equals profit.
And now a quick break to hear from
our sponsor.
Hey, it's Ty Crandall with Credit Suite.
Many of our subscribers want to get the
most money to grow their business at the
best terms.
Whether you're looking for startup capital, low interest
credit lines and loans, or business credit, we
can definitely help you.
So give us a call at 877-600
-2487, or schedule your free consultation at creditsuite
.com forward slash consult to see how much
money you can get approved for today.
A 3D investor is much more strategic.
He or she says, I don't care about
just the moment.
I want to know all the compound, residual,
recurring yield I get on this asset called
a leader, this asset called a buyer, this
asset called a salesperson, this asset called a
distribution channel, or this asset called a prospect.
And unless you really understand that, you're under
optimizing what you're doing.
Those are a couple of things, but I
mean, I can go on.
There are the biggest, if you have any
infrastructure, any employees, team, that the biggest, there's
variability.
There's variability, as I said, in salespeople.
And you can fix that.
I mean, if one salesperson is massively more
successful than another, there's eight or nine sub
elements in that.
You can figure what he or she does
differently.
You can model it out.
You can figure that certain people are specialists
and are three, four times better at a
certain thing, opening accounts or different industries or
different scenarios.
We've doubled business just by making people who
were doing everything but had one real superpower,
making them a specialist.
If most people, a lot of companies that
you probably deal with get a significant portion
of their revenue from word of mouth or
referrals.
That's good and it's bad.
It's good because it's an affirmation.
It's their buyer base thinks them valuable enough
and prizes them high enough to tell other
people.
But normally, if you have reactive referral generation
as your driver, it's episodic, it's intermittent.
One day, week, month, you get X, the
other, you get something, nothing.
Well, if you think about it, a referral
generated buyer buys sooner, negotiates less, buys more,
is more enjoyable to deal with, stays longer,
refers more people, costs nothing.
And yet the same people who get a
lot of business or much of it from
referral don't even, they spend money on the
outside market trying to attract what I call
outer peripheral trust, which is very hard to
convert to a buyer.
It's very inefficient.
Whereas if you had at least one, we
know 125, one, two, five, strategic referral generating
systematic approaches that you could put in play
in place to predictably multiply the quantity, quality,
and convertibility of referral generating business that comes
through.
You can go on and on and on,
but there's just a lot of stuff, man.
You've used these kinds of strategies to really
become the dominant force in multiple different markets.
So what's your best advice for somebody else?
I mean, what's the benefits of being the
dominant force in a market?
And what's your best advice for somebody that's
trying to become that dominant force in their
market?
Well, I'm gonna give it to you a
number of ways, and it's not arrogant.
This is just to be very candid.
You can command $120,000 for a day
at a time.
That's one benefit.
You can get Tony Robbins to let you
do a day together with him to his
most precious group of people, his $150,000
members.
You can get to travel the world and
be paid very handsomely and be given two
first-class tickets in the presidential suite.
There's a lot of perks, but probably more
than that is you're operating in a rarefied
strata of understanding and impact, and the world
looks like a 3D movie and you have
the only pair of glasses.
It's much more exhilarating when you're operating as
a preeminent person, whether it's you're running a
company or whether you're a preeminent team member,
manager, employee, whatever.
It's just, it's night and day.
I don't know if that answer is what
you wanted to hear.
No, absolutely.
What do you think, and when you've talked
about the benefits of being there, what do
you think are some of the best strategies
that somebody can deploy besides what you talked
about to be able to become that dominant
force?
We did a mini course a couple of
years ago on achieving greatness, and my premise
then, Ty, was that every human being is
innately programmed in their DNA to wanna be
great.
Nobody wants to be a mediocre entrepreneur, professional,
salesperson, employee, man, woman, husband, wife, parent, friend,
lover, but most people are, and the first
thing is to understand what greatness looks like,
and you can't do it unless you think
about people you admire that personify different elements
of greatness.
We identified, I think, eight categories.
Then you gotta see all these categories where
you fall in terms of that, and then
you've gotta decide which of those gaps is
the most mission-critical to whatever you're trying
to work on, your life, your being, your
marriage, your children, your business, your career, but
the hardest thing is to find the safest
path to get there.
Most people can't do that, and they also
need an advocate.
Your case with people who are trying to
rebuild their business credit, you're their advocate, your
team.
In my case, I'm the advocate that won't
allow people to undervalue their business, their product,
their service.
I'm someone who believes that if you are
adding more value to the marketplace than your
generic competitors, you have a moral obligation to
reach as many people as you can, not
because you're gonna make a lot more money,
but because they will be deserved by lesser
value-creating competitors, and they will be horribly
served if they equivocate, procrastinate, and don't take
action.
So I think you have to reset your
mental models, number one.
I think you've gotta understand that preeminence is
not about working just hard.
It's about really a bunch of different things.
The first is you wanna be on a
mission and crusade on behalf of the market
you serve.
You don't wanna just fall in love with
making money.
You don't wanna fall in love with your
company or even your product or service.
You wanna fall in love with the people
you serve, and you wanna see the work
you do, the product you sell, the service,
when it's at work in their life, their
life is enhanced, their life is protected, their
life is enriched, their life is entertained, depending
on what product or service is.
You want everybody in your organization to be
on a mission.
You wanna basically understand the user experience, the
friction factors, and it eliminates a lot of
things, but most people don't even get to
that point because they're in it to make
money, and it becomes laborious.
Instead of making it boring, I find that
if you have the right mindset, if you're
operating at a preeminent, rarefied strata, everything is
exhilarating.
Even problems are fascinating because it's a challenge
to resolve them and learn from them and
build on them, and it's a whole different
way of thinking, being, acting, and it's much
more externally focused.
Brian, you made a suggestion, and I thought
it was crazy, something I've never done on
a podcast interview before, because you are so
knowledgeable about the questions I'm asking you.
If you don't mind, ask me a question.
Well, what do you think that business owners
are interested to know but maybe don't know
about business credit, if you had to ask
a question?
Sure, well, I think that most people don't
understand.
My observation, because I did a book with
a guy named Roland Frazier on, the title
was Business Wealth Without Risk, and it had
to do with acquiring business, and it had
a lot of very inventive ways to use
credit and financial sources to really get control
of underperforming businesses.
I think the first thing is that most
people don't realize that credit is usually, with
growth companies, either credit or giving away equity
in the business, you need a vehicle.
Most companies, to try to grow internally just
on your own cash flow, you're gonna be
very limited unless you're a lifestyle, unless you're
a lifestyle entrepreneur.
So instead of fearing credit, you should appreciate
it.
You need to be judicious, but without it,
I would say you're probably limited in your
growth and your success, don't you think?
Oh, absolutely.
I would say very much so.
As a matter of fact, I think business
credit's more valuable than consumer credit because as
an entrepreneur, so much of our net worth
is tied up in our business, and business
credit inherently just makes the business worth substantially
more money.
I've had a chance to spend time with
Roland and teach a lot of his students
to be able to how to do that,
and it's astonishing how much even business credit
itself can help them make the decision of
the businesses they want to acquire, because those
businesses are- My point to you is
I don't think most people, I think they
look at it as a negative that they
feel is gonna bite them in the butt,
and they don't understand it's the greatest leverage
tool if you have the right strategy and
if you've got the right business model.
If you don't have a model that is
going to grow because you get credit, and
you don't have a model that that growth
is going to produce enough incremental profit gain
that'll easily service that credit, then you probably
shouldn't do it, but if you understand that
if you look at 90% of the
largest companies that everybody admires, and they look
at their stock, almost every one of them
has enormous layers of debt.
That's the only way they can grow.
They either have debt, or they've given up
a lot of their equity to venture capitalists
and private equity and those, but financing is
the lifeblood of outsized growth, but most people
who are not major companies they're financially illiterate
in terms, not demeaning them, just clinically die
in terms of their understanding of the power
of using business credit strategically.
You talked about having the model, that if
you have the right model, and then you
have the money, that that's when you can
really accomplish exponential growth.
What's your best advice for everybody out there
that's trying to figure out their way?
They're trying to figure out the best model
for their business to be able to set
on fire, to be able to reach those
levels of exponential growth.
Well, I think it's start where you are
and see what you don't know you know
about your business.
What's the average sale worth?
What's the average residual value, lifetime value?
But how much, if you get a hundred
new buyers, what are you gonna make the
first time on them?
How much more could you add to that
ethically with an upsell?
How much downsell could you use to get
revenue from the ones that currently don't buy
your one offering?
How many repurchases could you get in a
period of time?
What would those repurchases produce in combination as
far as profit?
If you had more funding to expand that
front end, the number of buyers or the
backend acquiring more products to sell, what would
the worst case, best case outcome be?
What are the margins be?
How much extra, how can you test it
before you get yourself in too much trouble?
And what's the highest and best use of
it?
Is it advertising?
Is it a sales force?
Is it partnerships outside?
And I think most people live in a
very, very limited world of understanding and without
expanded knowledge, you can't really capitalize on the
explosive opportunities that judicious strategic use of credit
in business can provide.
I mean, it's hilarious.
We've had people that had a very successful
small business and we would say to them,
so why don't you turn into a larger
one?
And they said, well, I just don't have
the capital.
And I'd say, let's just do the numbers.
And I'd show them that every time they
brought in a brand new, like if they
brought in 10 prospects and they got four
buyers and that buyer bought.