How to 10X Your Business | Tony Robbins Podcast

Intro

This episode of the Tony Robbins podcast is brought to you by Tony Robbins results coaching. Are you ready to experience an extraordinary quality of life, or maybe you’re already doing well but you know you can take your life to a whole new level? To do that, you have to set yourself up to win. You need a process, a way to consistently grow and produce the results that you need. That’s what a Tony Robbins results coach can do for you. Whatever area in your life you want to change—your relationship, your health, your career, your business—coaching is one of the most valuable tools you can have. It’s an investment in yourself and it can yield some of the highest returns. Tony Robbins results coaches are hand-selected and trained by the master of coaching, Tony Robbins himself, to have the skills that will empower you with supreme focus, powerful insight, and the accountability needed to achieve everything you’ve ever dreamed. To help you get started, Tony is offering podcast listeners a free results coaching strategy session with one of his top coaches. It’s a $200 value, and you’re getting it for free. Visit tonyrobbins.com/results to schedule that free session today. [Music]

Welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast. In this special mini-season, we are unlocking the vaults to bring you exclusive in-depth conversations between Tony and four truly outstanding achievers and impressive innovators. These individuals are not just experts in their respective fields who can speak to any facet or dynamic of the subject; they are pioneers, they are charting new territory and breaking new ground. Their insights, ideas, and drive are shaping the world that we live in, and hopefully, they will also enlighten and invigorate you in some real way so that you too are inspired to think outside the box and take some real action. So, without further ado, let’s get into the first episode. We’re excited to bring you a conversation Tony had with a marketing savant, Jay Abraham.

Jay has served as the consultant to some of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time and has assisted over 10,000 companies from more than 400 different industries around the world. While he’s recognized as the billion-dollar man, Jay has also been recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the top five executive coaches in the country. Jay has made his mark as a legendary marketing guru who knows what it takes to become the leader and most trusted source in your market.

I think you’re gonna especially enjoy this session, and I think for a lot of reasons. Number one, the person you’re gonna have a chance to visit with, along with myself, is a very, very special man. He’s brilliant and brilliant in an area that I think can really make a difference in your life, no matter how successful you already are, and that is the area called marketing. You might say, “Why would I want to know about marketing? I’m not a salesperson. I’m not running that portion of my business, or I’m not part of a business that does that.” Well, first of all, all businesses are about marketing in today’s society where things are so competitive. Very often, someone having a better product does not mean that they’re gonna have a better income or that they’re gonna have the person who’s the best at a job is it going to keep that job. We’re living in a society right now, as you and I both know, where there’s downsizing going on, where companies are going out of business very rapidly, and we’re doing the best job does not guarantee you a sense of certainty about your future. And many people are finding that what they were trained for four years is disappearing.

So, I think a talk that doesn’t just inspire you but really gives you some fundamental tools on how you can take control, how you can create a competitive edge for yourself, how to market yourself or how to take the business you own, if you own one, and market it more effectively is one that is extremely timely and one that I think can make a difference in your life. The secret, of course, for me was, okay, if I’m gonna do this subject, I could talk about this or I could bring someone in who I have tremendous respect for, who I think is one of the best in the world in this area, and I chose to do that. And we’re going to get a chance then to visit with a man by the name of Jay Abraham.

Jay is a phenomenal human being, quite articulate. In fact, he may use language that’ll leave some of us in the dust. I’ll have to make sure if he uses some terms that I’ll be the person to interrupt him and say, “What does that mean?” But he’s an amazing man. He is a gentleman, for example, to give you a perspective, who’s taken part now in more than 10,000 businesses, more than 10,000 companies are using his principles to run their businesses successfully. These are more than $20 million just from his consulting fees in the last 20 years, by adding value to companies, by coming in with a brand new perspective about how do you get your message across, how do you get people to want your product or service.

So, I want to get across a couple of things to you. Number one, as you listen, listen carefully for those distinctions that will relate to now where you are today in your life, but where you will be in the future. Today, you may not own a business, but what he’s talking about, about how to market a business, you can relate to a future business you may own, or you can relate to the idea of marketing yourself within your own company so you are valued. So, if there is a downsizing that occurs, people see the real value that you have. And the principles he shares are also quite fundamental. They require us to think differently. So, I can tell you all about his accolades in terms of his write-ups in the LA Times, the Success magazine, and the founders of Federal Express, but I think what’s more important is who this man is and what he can share with you. So, without any more platitudes, I think I should invite you into this conversation.

Jay, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Tony. Listen, we’re here in San Diego, so you may hear some jets flying over our head because we’re right next to the Top Gun school, which is kind of appropriate dealing with you, sir. You are a Top Gun. I understand now that you are charged $3,000 an hour for most that is done by telephone. You’re not even there in most cases. Your seminars often cost between $5,000 and $25,000 and hang upon how many people you allow to be in there. What makes you worth this kind of money to businesses and individuals? What do you do, sir?

I teach almost any kind of business or professional, Tony, how to harvest the windfall profit that’s sitting in every business, and most people don’t allow themselves to mine. I teach people how to turn one-shot sales into ongoing opportunities.

Harvesting Hidden Profits

In the automotive business, let me illustrate how you can uncover hidden profits. Imagine I walked into your business tomorrow. The first thing I’d look at is what you’re doing but not getting enough leverage from. Many businesses, knowingly or unknowingly, engage in various money-generating, selling, or prospect-generating processes that often go unrecognized, let alone measured and analyzed. To tap into these hidden profits, we need to recognize what these processes are and understand how they’re performing.

Let me introduce the concept of leverage in this context. Most people associate leverage with both upside potential and downside risk. In traditional investments like real estate or equipment leasing, there’s a potential for both gain and loss. However, in the business world, especially for employers and professionals, there exists an exceptional form of leverage – upside leverage. This leverage entails a fixed cost that remains constant, regardless of the performance of your business processes.

For instance, let’s consider advertising expenses. Whether you run an ad in the Sunday LA Times, send out a mailing piece, employ salespeople, generate referrals, conduct direct mailings, use field representatives, collaborate with manufacturers’ reps, advertise in trade publications, or participate in trade shows, the cost to run these operations remains constant, denoted as X.

Now, here’s where the magic of upside leverage comes into play. This fixed cost (X) is unrelated to the performance of these activities. The same ad that costs $10,000 in the Sunday LA Times can either yield one order or ten orders. The same mailing piece can generate a half-percent response, three percent, or ten percent. Similarly, the same salesperson can close deals with varying success rates – one out of twenty-five, one out of fifteen, one out of five, or one out of two.

This represents just the first layer of the upside leverage that is available to virtually every business but often goes unnoticed and unexploited. It’s a powerful tool that can unlock hidden profits within your business operations.

So, when I enter your business, I start by identifying these underutilized processes and show you how to harness their potential to create perpetual streams of income and gain a competitive advantage in your marketplace or industry. These intangible assets – advertising, marketing, sales, goodwill, customer relationships, distribution centers, and expertise – can be leveraged more effectively to your advantage.

Leveraging Profitability Through Effective Marketing

In business, the power of marketing can allow you to leverage your investment many times over, yielding substantial returns without the downside risks associated with traditional investments. The idea here is to get a 20, 30, or even 40 times return on your investment, which is challenging to achieve in passive investments with the same level of security.

However, while the potential for growth is vast, it’s essential to recognize that many businesses do not harness this power effectively. Two out of three businesses that start may not survive past five years because they fail to utilize these dynamics properly.

So, how can you achieve this leverage while maintaining a level of security? It starts by analyzing, measuring, identifying, and replacing underperforming aspects of your business operations, particularly in sales, marketing, and advertising. Let’s dive into some real-world examples to illustrate this concept:

1. Precious Metals Brokerage Firm: I worked with a brokerage firm selling precious metals. They were running ads in the Wall Street Journal promoting bank financing for silver and gold purchases. The headline of their ad read, “2/3 Bank Financing on Silver and Gold.” The ads were profitable, generating commissions for salespeople and covering overhead costs, leaving some profit. However, they hadn’t questioned whether they could achieve a much higher return on investment. They began to accept the current profitability rather than striving for a twenty or thirty times return.

   How did I help them achieve more? I asked them if they had ever tested different headlines. I explained that when an ad is performing well, the first thing to change is the opening statement. In a fixed print ad, it’s the headline; in direct mailings, it could be the headline or opening phrase. For a salesperson, it’s the first paragraph they utter. The goal is to make the first statement a powerful declaration of the self-serving result the prospective customer will receive from your product or service.

   People buy results and benefits, not just products. They want to know what’s in it for them. The clearer and more compelling you can express the benefit to the end-user, the more effective your marketing will be.

These examples illustrate that by identifying and optimizing underperforming aspects of your business, especially in your marketing and sales efforts, you can achieve a higher return on investment and tap into hidden profits. Marketing and effective messaging play a crucial role in this process, as they allow you to leverage your resources while providing clear benefits to your customers.

Unlocking Hidden Business Potential

In today’s fast-paced society, capturing attention and meeting people’s needs swiftly is vital. A powerful opening premise, headline, or preface sets the stage for addressing those needs effectively.

Let me continue with the story of the precious metals brokerage firm. They were running ads with the headline “2/3 Bank Financing on Silver and Gold.” The ads were profitable, but they hadn’t aimed for the highest potential return. By changing the headline to “Send us just $100 an ounce for gold selling at $300 an ounce,” they made a significant impact. The same space, about twelve words, significantly improved the ad’s performance. Profits went from $50,000 to $250,000 per run, resulting in substantial gains.

Now, consider the concept of the lifetime value of a customer. Most businesses do not calculate this essential metric. I worked with a client in the fluid transmission product industry. They had six salespeople operating independently, and their compensation was based on pure commission, where salespeople received around 10% of the profit.

Upon analyzing their business, we discovered that the average worst-case new customer was worth about $200 in gross profit to the company. On average, customers bought from them five times a year for three years. This meant that, with each new customer, they were accruing $3,000 in cumulative profits, which they had not recognized before.

We implemented a new compensation plan: as long as salespeople maintained production levels from existing customers at or above past averages, they would receive 100% of the profit on every new sale they brought in. This incentive led to a significant increase in sales and profits.

The key takeaway here is that leveraging dormant resources and applying human ingenuity can yield substantial improvements in various aspects of a business, resulting in increased profits and a better quality of life. This principle applies not only to business owners but also to individuals looking to enhance their personal productivity and leverage their time, creativity, knowledge, and expertise.

Now, let’s delve into the example of IcyHot. This is another great illustration of how clever thinking and resource allocation can generate remarkable results.

Unlimited Upside: Allocating for Results, Not Budgets

One remarkable strategy to unlock hidden potential in business is to allocate an allowable cost per sale, lead, or transaction rather than adhering to traditional budgetary figures. This approach shifts the focus from set budgets to results-driven investments, allowing businesses to tap into an unlimited upside potential.

Imagine replacing the conventional budgetary approach with a method where you allocate a specific amount per prospect or sale, knowing the residual value and lifetime worth of a customer. This change in perspective opens up the opportunity for businesses to achieve remarkable growth and profits.

For instance, consider the case of IcyHot, a therapeutic product similar to BenGay or Mentholatum. The company initially faced financial challenges but received heartfelt letters from loyal customers who relied on the product for relief from conditions like bursitis, neuritis, and arthritis.

To revive the business without a substantial budget, they adopted an unconventional strategy. Instead of paying for advertising upfront, they approached various media outlets, radio and TV stations, magazines, catalog companies, and mail-order firms. They proposed a unique arrangement: these outlets could offer IcyHot to their customers for free, keeping 100% of the sales revenue.

This might sound counterintuitive, but their innovative approach considered the lifetime value of a customer. By analyzing past data, they discovered that each customer, on average, would make about ten purchases per year, generating $25 in net profit for the company over time.

Although the initial cost of sending out the product and handling bulk shipments was about $0.45 per jar, the subsequent customer loyalty and repeated purchases were immensely profitable. The company offered coupons, further boosting sales, and eventually built a multi-million-dollar business.

This approach exemplifies the power of focusing on results rather than budget constraints. Instead of spending on advertising, they paid for actual sales and benefited from an unlimited budget as their customers continued to return and make repeat purchases.

This strategy showcases the kind of leverage that can be achieved when businesses embrace innovative thinking and prioritize long-term customer value. It is an approach that allows for unlimited upside potential without the traditional downside risks associated with budgetary constraints.

The Three Ways to Grow a Business Exponentially

Growing a business exponentially involves mastering the three fundamental ways to expand any enterprise. These principles apply across various industries and are key to achieving significant growth:

1. Increase the Number of Customers or Prospects:

One of the primary ways to grow a business is by expanding the customer base. This means finding more people who are interested in your products or services and converting them into customers. Strategies to achieve this may include:

• Marketing and Advertising: Use effective marketing campaigns to reach a broader audience, attract new prospects, and convert them into customers.
• Lead Generation: Implement lead generation techniques to gather potential customers’ contact information, allowing you to nurture these leads into paying customers.
• Networking and Partnerships: Build strategic partnerships with other businesses or individuals who can refer potential customers to your business.

2. Increase the Unit of Sale:

The second way to achieve exponential growth is by increasing the average value of each sale or transaction. This can be accomplished through various means, such as:

• Upselling and Cross-Selling: Offer related or complementary products or services to customers who have already made a purchase, increasing their overall spending.
• Product Bundling: Combine multiple products or services into bundles or packages, encouraging customers to buy more at once, often at a discounted price.
• Premium and High-Value Offers: Develop premium versions of your products or services with added features or benefits, allowing you to charge higher prices.

3. Increase the Frequency of Purchase or Residual Value:

The third strategy for exponential growth focuses on retaining and maximizing the value of existing customers over time. This entails:

• Customer Loyalty Programs: Implement loyalty programs that reward customers for repeat purchases, encouraging them to come back regularly.
• Subscription Models: Offer subscription-based services or products, ensuring a recurring stream of revenue from committed customers.
• Continual Engagement: Stay in touch with customers through newsletters, updates, and personalized recommendations to keep them engaged and informed about your offerings.

By mastering these three growth strategies, businesses can exponentially increase their revenue and overall success. However, it’s essential to remember that growth should be accompanied by effective management, scalability, and maintaining the quality of products or services to ensure long-term sustainability and customer satisfaction.

Overcoming Expertise and Conventional Thinking to Optimize Business

Overcoming expertise and conventional thinking is a significant challenge when it comes to optimizing a business. Let’s explore why expertise can be a double-edged sword and how to break free from conventional thinking to achieve optimal results:

Expertise as a Double-Edged Sword:

1. Tunnel Vision: People with deep expertise in a particular field often develop tunnel vision. They become so focused on the standard practices and industry norms that they may miss innovative opportunities or fail to see the potential for optimization.
2. Resistance to Change: Experts may be resistant to change because they believe they have already mastered their domain. This resistance can hinder adaptability and limit the willingness to explore new strategies.
3. Echo Chamber Effect: Professionals within the same industry tend to share similar knowledge and perspectives. This can lead to an echo chamber effect, where everyone reinforces existing practices and avoids unconventional ideas.

Breaking Free from Conventional Thinking:

1. Challenge Assumptions: To optimize a business, start by challenging long-held assumptions. Question why things are done a certain way and whether there are alternative approaches that could yield better results.
2. Embrace Creativity: Encourage creative thinking and brainstorming sessions within your team. Bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and industries to introduce fresh perspectives and ideas.
3. Continuous Learning: Recognize that expertise should not equate to the end of learning. Stay curious and open to new knowledge, trends, and technologies that could reshape your industry.
4. Seek External Input: Collaborate with external consultants, mentors, or advisors who can provide an outsider’s view of your business. They can offer valuable insights and challenge the status quo.
5. Testing and Experimentation: Be willing to experiment and test new strategies, even if they deviate from industry norms. A culture of experimentation can lead to breakthroughs and optimizations.
6. Customer-Centric Approach: Focus on understanding your customers’ needs and preferences deeply. Customer feedback and data should drive your decisions and innovations.
7. Benchmark Against the Best: Study successful businesses across different industries, as they may employ strategies that can be adapted to your field. Benchmarking against the best can reveal new possibilities for optimization.
8. Continuous Improvement: Adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. Regularly review your processes, strategies, and outcomes to identify areas for enhancement.
9. Risk Tolerance: Be willing to take calculated risks in pursuit of optimization. Not all experiments will yield immediate results, but they can contribute to long-term growth.
10. Collaborative Learning: Foster a culture of collaborative learning within your organization, where employees share their knowledge and experiences to collectively drive optimization.

Optimizing a business requires breaking free from the limitations of expertise and conventional thinking. Embrace change, challenge assumptions, and remain open to innovative approaches. By doing so, you can uncover new opportunities for growth and success in your industry.

Introduction

I’ve been privy looking at four hundred separate industries. When you look at 400 separate industries, you really get two things. It’s like traveling. You travel outside of Los Angeles; you see there’s a lot of different lifestyles than the one in LA. When you travel outside of California, you see there’s a lot of different climates, a lot of different values. When you travel outside of the United States, you see that there’s a lot of different cultures, a lot of different values, a lot of different work ethics, a lot of different climates, temperatures. Exotic things give you a broader selection of choices for your life as a possibility. It gives you more distinctions.

Marketing Context

When I got the privilege of traveling amongst 400 separate unrelated industries, I saw to my fascination the fact that if you look at a hundred industries, almost ninety-five of them drive their enterprise, bring in their customers, run their operations from a totally different marketing context than one another. In other words, industry A operates from a marketing aspect totally different than industry B. Everything’s in full.

Examples

For example, let’s take a manufacturing concern. Most of them basically sell with either manufacturers’ reps or ads in trade publications or going to trade shows. That’s all they do. They don’t do direct mail; they don’t do joint ventures. Other people already have their customers. They don’t basically get endorsements in publications. They don’t do any of the possibilities.

Marketing Avenues

But certain people, if you look at the basic ten ways most people drive their business, you’ll find that every company or every industry has one of them that is the predominant way they drive their business. Way one might be running ads in consumer publications; way two might be running ads in trade publications; way three might be generating leads and converting them through direct mail or through telemarketing or through some other kind of mechanism like a trade show mechanism; four might be telemarketing; mechanism five might be retailing; mechanism six might be a catalog; mechanism seven might be subcontract representation.

Realtor Example

Let’s take a realtor, for example. They’ve got a realtor out there who’s gonna be going out there and doing it using some of these tools. Most realtors basically knock on doors cold, or they sit, or they run ads that nobody reads, and it doesn’t have any offer or any benefit or result that’s in store for the reader who might want to buy or sell a home, or they stand for 12 hours quietly and silently in an open house that no one comes to see.

Maximizing Realtor’s Effectiveness

So, what would you do with that realtor to have that realtor be more effective? The first thing I would do is go back in time. I would go back and teach them how to express to customers or clients from now forward how much of an advantage, how much of a benefit, how much of a greater result they will get by favoring this realtor over everybody else. I’d reiterate to them how much they did for their customers in the process of selling their house, representing them, and negotiating the purchase.

Reconnecting with Old Customers

I’d go back to all the old customers they ever called on and have them contact them all to better appreciate what they did for them. So it becomes evident when they ask this question, “Do you think you were benefited by having me serve you instead of somebody else?”

Leveraging Existing Customers

In the scope of your life, you must have an inordinate number of friends, relatives, co-workers, church members, or associates who are either wanting to sell or purchase a home. If they agree that you benefited them, the greatest service would be to contact them and get them to seek out my professional opinion on the best strategy, approach, and sites they should consider, irrespective of whether they buy from me or not.

Creating Referrals

Some people say it’s basic, just creating referrals, but when you ask people how they get referrals, most people say they ask for names to call. What I’m saying is you reestablish or establish the distinction and get your customers to sell for you because that’s the greatest leverage in the world.

Leveraging Predictability

what you can do to leverage that baseline to get greater results. You’re trying to increase the predictability of your business, and the future becomes more certain.

Testing and Improvement

You test different ways of doing each process conservatively. When you see improvement, you have two options. First, you can replace what was your baseline or your control process with the one that produces better results. Second, you can keep what was working before if it was profitable, especially if it impacts a different segment of the market.

Building a Broad Base

Building a broad base with different pillars can be a strategy to maintain different working processes while introducing improvements.

Ensuring Predictability

Your goal is to raise the baseline and lower the variance in performance. This allows you to increase the predictability of your business and have a clear understanding of what you can count on in the future, with only a small variance.

Conclusion

So, the key is measuring, analyzing, and continually improving your business processes to maximize efficiency and profitability. This philosophy of optimization ensures that you get the maximum benefit with minimal waste and effort, leading to long-term success.

Building Multiple Pillars

in the future. Plus or minus a small variance. You can’t manage something you can’t measure, and you can measure almost anything, but people have never really been taught to do that.

The Diving Board Analogy

Most businesses are like a diving board with one post holding it up. This post represents the method or mechanism they depend on to generate sales and customers. However, if something disrupts that post, like external factors such as government changes, economic shifts, or new competitors, the business is in trouble or can go out of business.

The Solution: Building a Parthenon

The solution is to build your business on multiple pillars. Each pillar represents a different way of generating business or leads. These pillars can include direct selling, telephone marketing, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and more. If one pillar falters, it may impact a portion of your business, but it won’t debilitate or terminate your ability to exist.

Leveraging Multiple Pillars

Creating multiple pillars allows you to raise your baseline and lower the variance in performance, leading to increased predictability and profitability. You systematically create your business to be based on these multiple pillars that support it, ensuring long-term success.

Examples of Building Multiple Pillars

An example of building multiple pillars is expanding a business from one-on-one consulting to seminars, writing books, producing audio tapes, using television, and more, as long as they all align and generate profits. Another example is helping businesses in the precious metals industry build many pillars for growth, including safe and logical ways to expand their business exponentially.

Expanding a Precious Metals Business

In the case of a precious metals business, the company initially had no formalized marketing and relied on occasional recommendations from a small newsletter. They sold gold, silver, and rare coins, but if you bought one, they didn’t follow up. The goal was to identify safe and logical ways to grow their business exponentially and build multiple pillars of success.

Building Customer Confidence

dollars this way you’d make an offer and say, “Listen, if you’re thinking about investing in gold or silver, try it for 90 days. If you don’t like it, we’ll buy it back at the price you paid.” This offer reduced the fear factor and allowed people to try precious metals without the fear of making a mistake.

Expanding Marketing Strategies

As we expanded our marketing strategies, we also leveraged television, airport promotions, and outside promoters. Each of these strategies became a separate pillar that supported our business.

Replicating Successful Strategies

When one strategy worked masterfully, we didn’t settle for just one. Instead, we replicated it and set up relationships with various dealers to expand our reach.

The Importance of Trust and Integrity

Our success was built on trust and integrity. We were honest, provided value, and delivered on our promises. By under-promising and over-delivering, we gained the trust of our customers and encouraged them to invest more.

Conclusion

Building multiple pillars of success in your business ensures resilience against external disruptions and increases predictability and profitability. Trust, honesty, and a focus on customer satisfaction are key elements in this approach to business growth and optimization.

Building Confidence and Offering Value

implemented a strategy of selling silver dollars at a lower cost to encourage people to get comfortable with investing. You provided them with valuable information, historical significance, and expert opinions to help them make an informed decision.

Multiple Pillars of Success

You continued to diversify your marketing strategies, including sending out books and literature on economics, leveraging the Krugerrand marketing strategy, and using direct mail to generate leads. Each of these strategies contributed to the growth of your business.

Leveraging Expert Opinions

By including interviews with respected economists who had differing perspectives on precious metals, you provided balanced information to your customers, further building trust and credibility.

Expanding Customer Base

Your approach of offering a lower-priced introductory product and then upselling to higher-value investments allowed you to expand your customer base and increase sales over time.

Conclusion

Your success story highlights the importance of building multiple pillars of success in business, offering value to customers, and continually diversifying marketing strategies to ensure long-term growth and profitability.

The Importance of Optimization

Optimization is the process of getting the maximum yield for the maximum duration of time from the minimal investment. It involves maximizing every asset, opportunity, relationship, distribution channel, employee, and piece of capital in your business. Optimization is crucial in today’s business environment, where efficiency and effectiveness are key.

Recognizing Opportunities for Optimization

Many people fail to recognize all the areas, opportunities, options, and pillars available for optimization in their business because they have tunnel vision and are focused only on what they currently do. To optimize, you must first identify the assets, opportunities, and options available to your business.

Changing Your Mindset

Changing your mindset is essential to optimization. You must believe that there are hundreds of other ways to do things, even if what you are currently doing is working at a certain level. Embrace the belief that there are multiple strategies that can maximize your business’s success.

Forming an Optimal Success Strategy

To form an optimal success strategy, you need to develop a different philosophy to operate your business and life. This philosophy should focus on serving others, being externally focused, and providing value. It requires a holistic and totalistic approach to your business, where you consider the integrated benefits and returns rather than isolated costs and losses.

The Self-Serving Nature of Selflessness

Ironically, serving others selflessly is the most self-serving thing you can do. By optimizing your business to provide maximum value to your customers, clients, or partners, you create a win-win situation where both parties benefit. This approach leads to long-term success, growth, and profitability.

Topic: Building Success and Value

“others in what you do to try and serve others that help us support Nate totally your own needs right, okay so you can’t Ford you better philosophy until you first change, and this is where your brilliant, your mindset replacing blocks and impediments and limiting beliefs with empowering ones, right? basically people don’t realize you’re not playing the game for the moment, exactly playing it for forever and when you look at it in that context see I’ve seen these very shallow thinkers think they’re really astute because they made a little more profit in front, but they basically totally eliminated the residual effect, and the residual value is where all the wealth and life comes from, and I think the ultimate residual value is the identity that you create in the marketplace, I agree because what people know about you and believe about you and what you do for them is what’s gonna ultimately give you the leverage to do whatever you want to do in your life and you can’t replace identity so a lot of what you’re saying in terms of being selfless is when you give that much value to people’s lives it builds an identity which makes people want to business tell other people about business whether you’re the realtor or whether you’re IcyHot with whoever it is in terms of the business I want to come back to one thing and I may have interrupted your flow if I come back to it let’s talk about this in terms of a person who doesn’t own a business because I’ve talked about this several times I don’t think we’ve really addressed it how does a person build more pillars how do they optimize how did they really build a greater sense of certainty for their future by using these same principles how do we put them in a position either within the company where they have multiple ways of being valuable the company so the company is not gonna down I mean what a company looks to downsize they’re looking employees and they’re looking from the perspective of who’s adding the most value who can they afford to eliminate who can’t think who is who do they see is yeah and now we’re getting down what marketing is so let me ask you two questions of course I want finish optimization but then tell me what is marketing give us your definitions as this whole topic has been about it and then secondly how do we use optimization and marketing if we don’t own a business right now to have greater leverage in terms of our since a certain amount of future okay you want me to finish this where was I every time we were talking about increasing or overcoming limiting beliefs so it’s great all right you can’t adopt a superior mindset until you de frida fine the purpose and objective of your business from a customer or client benefit perspective in other words most people in business they lost from the beginning there are self-fulfilling prophecy they’re mediocre in success and in fulfillment because their purpose is incorrect its erroneous you’ve got to basically set yourself up to understand what is the best and the highest and the most distinctive and the most valuable result or benefit or purpose my service or my company or my value-added to that company or service can bring to you the customer until it unless you understand and then redirect and refocus all your company’s activities towards that outcome you aren’t going to get exponential well most businesses again are tending focus on how to make a profit versus how do they serve the customer in the greatest possible way and the most part but they think it’s because they erroneously think that those are separate they’re not they are absolutely the same function anyhow you can’t redefine your business’s highest and best purpose until you decide to innovate in my mind because it it’s purest sense innovation is the bringing or the adding of superior value to the end-user doesn’t matter if you innovate in your factory it’s useless if it doesn’t bring an advantage to the end-user you may have told me it might bring a price advantage to the end-user potentially well that’s fine okay but if it doesn’t a lot of times people do things but they don’t pass the advantage on to the customer so I guess they think that they’re basically making more profit but sooner or later if you don’t bring an innovation based benefit on a continuous basis to your customer you won’t keep their patronage okay that makes it okay you can’t add value to someone or someone can’t see you adding value until and unless they understand and appreciate what you’re doing what you’ve done what you will do differently more beneficially for them and that requires better marketing because Tony in its purest sense marketing is two things it’s the continual educating of a customer or prospect for the life of that customer on the advantages and benefits and self-serving to them results you your company or your service brings them that no one else does or can or will and it’s the intelligently formulated process of increasing their demand or desire for your product to service and finally it’s the strategic process of bringing them to closure and to completed action so we’re really talking about marketing is I like this definition you said it’s a lifelong process with the customer because that presupposes we’re gonna have an ongoing relationship but it’s educating them as to what’s the what do they get by working with us versus anybody else and then the process of using that education to increase their desire for our product is that it well their desire but their appreciation it’s giving them giving it’s giving them a basis to discriminate in your behalf interesting very interesting so let’s come back again to the individual now how does an individual who doesn’t own a business optimize or really build a Parthenon if you will for their financial life for their business life for their career it’s very simple the moment you believe it’s simple all you got to do is put yourself in the position of your employer your employer is as scared as you are your employer if it’s privately owned it’s a man or woman or a group of investors who have sunk enormous amounts of capital and human capital into it they are very eager to see that investment continue to pay out they are hopeful it’ll pay out long enough they can retire they probably are very eager to see it pay out long enough they might even be able to sell it as soon as you help give them their outcome they will love you treasure you and never want you to leave how do you do that by identifying greater more effective ways they can make their enterprise throw off greater profit they can get more customers from the action just doing the same thing I suggest that any business owner do but do it as a de-facto business owner identify what they are first of all figure out how many other better more effective ways you can get customers you can convert prospect to customers you can increase the unit of sale you can increase the frequency of sale other things you can do with customers are with or with prospects who are inactive when you’ve identified what those are go to your employer and because you’ll find once you understand these they are so much more powerful by and large than anything your company is doing that the moment are within a few weeks or months of implementing them.”

Topic: Adding Value and Monetizing Processes

“they bring such advantage to your business that you don’t want to necessarily reveal them to your employer until you effect the right structure, you go to your employer and assume that means economic structure for your added value, that’s right. Now I’m giving you both sides of the transaction in this interview. You go to your employer, you make them a very simple proposition. You ask them if on your own time, you are able to identify, to organize, to implement in the most conservative manner so it’s no threat to the company, no risk, no risk to the company processes, mechanisms, activities, efforts that will increase massively the amount of profit, sales, etc., that the company gets. And keywords are all of them will augment; they will never supplant the business activities, the customer activities; it will only bring increase that you’re adding more pillars, not taking away what they’re already doing, which they’re committed to and believe is the essence of their business. If I can do that for the company, can I, if it makes a lot of money, can I get back a dime or a quarter for every dollar I make you? If that’s too rich, can I get back a nickel or a dime? And if that’s too rich, can I get back an extra $5,000 every time I make the company X for as long—this is the key—for as long as it keeps working, huh?”

“And would you mind putting it in a simple letter for me, sir or ma’am, as the case may be? It’s all about adding value, and again, if you’re doing that continuously, and even in some cases, some people might choose not to ask for compensation but just add the value so they’ve become invaluable to the company, that’s only one, yes, that’s why I’m gonna get a little sexier with it. If I make—well, you do it right there, Jay, you are so sexy, I used to—it’s a pretty interesting concept because the basic premise is presuming and assuming you’re going to bring things in, but that’s only—think of it as a dual valve because you can export things to most companies. If you look at any business, we talk about processes; almost every business has at least one in multiple aspects of it where their processes are more effective, more powerful, more profitable, more efficient, more productive than anything else in their industry or in similar industries. Cases in point, certain companies have got their manufacturing structure down where they get greater efficiency per hour or per manpower per 100 square feet; they get less wastage; they’ve got greater ways to do things; they have greater tax advantages. You can take those techniques that are being used internally and you can license or sell or rent those to other people outside of—here’s an example.”

“I had a car wash one time; the guy who came to me to try to improve his sales, in looking at his operations, I realized that his process of getting people to take the hot wax and all the other options was about three times better than almost any other car washing in the country. And I said, ‘Why don’t you sell that technique to other people?’ and he reluctantly tried, and he ended up getting a thousand car wash facilities to pay him, I think it was like $100 a month to use his way of articulating the option of the wax so that three times as many people took the wax option. That was all profitable. I had a realtor one time who—she was a very hot realtor who sold three offices to a big like Coldwell Banker or Remax or Century 21, and she was great at listing. She was great at listing, and she was sitting on her thumbs, like, ‘I need to figure something to do after I sold my business,’ and I got her to take the technique she used to list and teach other people outside of—she the first one she did, she made $60,000 in three days teaching people at $1,000, you want more. I mean, I’ve got—but I’ve taught it so the point is within your company if you look at the way your company operates, chances are every company, if they’ve never thought about this because it’s just the way they do business, they either sell better, they have ads that maybe they don’t even use anymore that pull better on average than the industry norm, they have better closing mechanisms, they have a higher frequency of repurchase, a higher unit of sale; they operate the manufacturing facilities more effectively, more properly, with less downtime, with less wastage; they get greater yield per employee or per dollar or per hour; they have greater, more efficient delivery; they have a lower, what’s called CSI or Customer Satisfactory Index; they’ve got—they’ve developed techniques that give them legal tax loopholes they don’t know about. All of those processes can be standardized and can be sold or licensed or traded or leased or contingency made access to people for monthly fees, for buyouts, for percentages. You can do that for your employer and set up a profit center that can make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, and you can set yourself up with the right proposition and the right structure and the right signed agreement to get that revenue residually forever, even if you quit your job. Does that make sense?”

“The next total sense, I mean, it’s just one way, but there’s tons of ways you can—and you can—you know what to do it there; you can do it also for other people; you can buy and sell concepts; you can be a brokerage firm. I mean, so the idea is how many more ways can you mate? And by the way, I’m talking predominantly in a money-making—I’ve just given you the one aspect. Your company is a flipside; how many ways can you get your company more efficient? Because their idea downsizing is very limited; most entrepreneurs don’t have the slightest understanding of all kinds of ways to reduce their costs, to improve their productivity. And I was just talking in the first segment of this interview about ways to increase sales; well, the flip side, there’s all kinds of things. If you just improve such things.”

Reducing Attrition and Thinking Outside the Box

“as if you reduce attrition, which is the loss of customers, or conservation, which is the retention of customers, a 10% reduction in loss—and most people don’t ever measure how many customers don’t come back—but if you look at your inactive customers, how many new customers come, how many didn’t buy that were on the customer list last year, that alone can increase your sales. All you do is look at other ways you can bring your employer improvements, efficiencies, reductions that they wouldn’t have done on their own, and you can ask for percentages of savings, of increased productivity; you can ask for bonuses; you can ask for that residually and not tie it to your job, and with a few simple phrases uttered on paper and signed, they can downsize you and terminate you, and you can still get a residual check for life. And what I’ve done with a lot of people when they did that was teach them to go to the employer and get a buyout, and that’s until you get a lump sum. Oh, that’s wonderful; it’s another reason which they can maybe start a new business. That’s right or get the employer to fund things for them or give them space or give them capital or joint venture with them; it’s all kinds of things you can do. It just takes the ability to, with the Australians coined it, ‘step outside the box,’ move outside your paradigm.”

“Maybe a good example that member being shared with me was an example where I think you were talking to someone about the customers they weren’t getting. They’d run some advertisement, and people had not bought their product or service, and you turned around and said, ‘Well, that’s a great opportunity. If they’ve not bought, they’re not necessarily gonna buy from you, but they’re gonna buy from somebody. Why not sell that to your competitors? You’re even figuring how to maximize or optimize the people that don’t buy from you. Let’s talk about that and relate that to, if you would, you know, thinking outside the box.'”

“So, let’s talk about upside leverage optimization for a minute. People are limiting their, if even if you understand what you think I said, you tend to think about it only in the context of your business. Think about it in the global expanse that there’s all these people who don’t have a clue what they’re doing, business owners, competitors if you will, complementary people and competitors who are spending enormous amounts of human capital and money bringing in prospects, bringing in customers, and you are—so, I believe that one of the greatest areas of opportunity and optimization and profit is in the people. People don’t sell. I did a seminar one time, made $200,000 on this. I was selling a training program to put people into a certain kind of business. I went through Entrepreneur Magazine and saw two or three other people who had a similar training program. I went to them and asked them if they would let me furnish them with a letter they would send to their existing people who paid to go to their training.

They refused both of them. I said, ‘Fine, you have prospects who inquired and didn’t convert.’ They said, ‘Sure, we got tons of them.’ I said, ‘Great, will you sign a letter to them saying, in essence, this: ‘We were gratified when you inquired, we were sad when you didn’t take advantage of our training, but we realized there must have been one of a few reasons: either the timing wasn’t right, it was too expensive, or the opportunity didn’t work for your skill set. If you’re still wanting to go in business for yourself, there’s only one other person we think might help you,’ and they recommended me, and I made $200,000 by getting them to—I said those people didn’t respond because they weren’t interested in going in business. You either didn’t have the right compelling offer, you didn’t make the right proposition, your concept was wrong, your approach was wrong, your people were wrong, but they raised their hand for a reason. I can give you more, but does that help you? Yes, it does. So, that’s part of thinking outside the nine dots.”

“What makes you think the way you do, Jay? I mean, what is it your background tells us a little bit—you know, how do you become the marketing guru per se? Where do you get this thought process that you have? I mean, now I understand you’ve had so many exposures or so many different businesses, but where did it start? I’d.”

Personal Background and Diverse Experiences

I really be curious what started it started very accidentally. I said to you earlier, I had a background being an absolute business Tranzit. I’ve done so many unrelated things in my life. For example, I was a cost accountant, I sold electric shavers, I leased trucks for Hertz, I sold radio advertising, I ran and sold dry-cleaning uniform rental, and a bit you don’t know what dust control is, do you? Swear in the Midwest, you rent mats and mops to white people’s feet and businesses so they don’t traipse it over. That’s a very lucrative business. We did uniform rental. I was in the sway chling. I was in the 8-track stereo tape duplication business. I was in the real estate business. I was in the affinity travel business. I was in the Association business. I was in the patent medicine business. I was in the chemical business. I can go on and on. These were jobs, some were jobs, some were part-time, some were join me. I said I was basically I had two kids when I was 20, I had no college education, and I had to basically use my ingenuity and my agility. Sometimes I’d have one time I had three full-time jobs. No one knew what they were all selling, and I made big profits at all of them because I always learned to deal with results, not time, right?

Learning from Varied Experiences

So what you did is rather than having salaries of those times, you got a percentage. Everything was very… But what I realized when I would leave a job, most people have a period of their life where they have an experience, and they do something, they go to a lot of… You’ll go to a totally unrelated field, and they sort of turn off. They sort of compartmentalize, and they relegate to the catacombs of the dusty past everything they’ve learned. I had this tendency to say, “What did I learn about that situation that made sense?” And I’ll go back. For example, when I was a cost accountant, I learned the allowable cost of something. And I thought, “That’s interesting.” When I sold shavers, I learned about coop advertising. I learned about selling that even though we had distributors, they never bought if you didn’t sell through to a retailer. So dealing with distributors was almost a nuisance because they would not buy a lot unless you gave them order, so you had to sell to the end-user. I learned that purchases weren’t always made based on viability; it was other things you gave them.

For example, I’ll tell you a funny story of how I sold $200,000 worth of shavers in Indianapolis at Christmastime. I was very curious. Most people need to be more curious, and curiosity and discovery are external processes. It doesn’t occur if you stay limited myopically to what’s going on in your industry. I studied everything, and I learned that billboard companies selling billboards normally; no one bought billboards from December the 15th to January the 15th. It was a dead time, and most anyone who bought up till then got free advertising through them, and the billboard companies hated it. But there were no buyers.

Well, I also learned that in shaver advertising, you accrued co-op. You bought something, and the manufacturer would give you matching funds based on certain purchases. They would pay $0.50, and you paid 50 cents up to a certain dollar, but most people didn’t use it because the manufacturers had what I’ll call tombstone ads that didn’t sell, and most people didn’t use it; it dissipated, and if you didn’t spend it, it accrued back to the manufacturer. I was the district sales manager for the city. I realized there was a lot of accrued unused co-op advertising that was 0.1, 0.2. I realized there were all these billboards that weren’t paid for, they weren’t being used, and all these unhappy billboard companies. I went to the billboard companies and ended up making a deal. I bought $200,000 worth of billboards for $10,000 cash because they were chagrined at all.

Learning from Advertising Experiences

These advertisers who took advantage of them, I took the $200,000 worth of billboards and went to the biggest drug chain in Indianapolis. I offered them two hundred thousand dollars worth of billboards if they buy two hundred thousand dollars worth of shavers. Oh my gosh, they were excited. But I realized they would earn the two hundred thousand dollars the shavers would have earned them twenty thousand dollars worth of coop. So I ended up saving ten thousand dollars on our coop allocation in the process. But I learned various things as I went along. When I did, I see odd. I learned not only that you can get advertisers to accept performance instead of just a rate card, but I learned the value of the residual sale. I learned don’t pay for advertising; pay for results. I learned to develop the back end.

Understanding the Four Critical Factors

When I was in the lead generating business, I learned the four Fiona. Don’t you know that the four critical factors of generating a lead that no one knows about? It’s very fast. Most people don’t understand. Everyone generates leads, a yellow page, you had a phone call, a lead, somebody you meet, leads have four critical factors. What they cost is only one, the conversion rate is the second factor, the unit of sale is the third factor, and the residual value is the fourth. Until you know all four of those factors, you don’t know anything. People say, “Well yeah, our leads cost us $25 or a new customer costs us 50.” That doesn’t matter. What matters is what do they bring in the first sale? How often do they come back? What’s the profit on them? Until you analyze all those, a lot of people who generate leads, they don’t even analyze them. But the few that analyze them, they standardized them all together. They say, “Well, the lead cost us 25 bucks.” But you may have a lead coming from one source that cost you a hundred. That’s ten times more valuable than ones that cost you five. I learned all these things. I learned so many things.

Turning Experiences into Usable Technology

I became like the opening of the Six Million Dollar Man, remember that, where they show the matrix, so they show the grid where they’ve got the computer things going sideways and drawn and criss-crossing? I saw what your brain looks like. What is when I look at something, I don’t say it’s gone. It’s gotten to be automatic pilot. In the beginning, I discipline myself to say, “How many better ways? How many other ways? What have I learned from other people that could be applied?” That’s what I did. They did that consciously. Now automatically, I look at it as you have so many circuits you’ve already wired up, and every time I work with another group because I’d add to the references because I change, I basically, I do something no one else does. I don’t conduct my programs; I make the participants conduct the programs, and as such, I learn as I’m teaching, and all that’s stored away. And every time I learned a new way, I learned how somebody else uses my techniques. I learned techniques. I have a nice file I’m away, and then I standardize them and categorize them now under the distinctions of these three ways to grow a business or the other categories, and it just sort of becomes natural.

The Power of Questions in Business

But it’s not as complex; it can be taught very easily as attested to the hundreds or thousands of people that have been able to successfully use it. Well, part of it, I know you’re a power talk listener as well, and one of the most popular ones we’ve had is the power of questions. And really, thinking is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions. And you’ve asked questions that have helped you to take all these experiences, these references, and turn them into active usable technology, distinctions, things that can improve the quality of life. So I know you’ve often said that in business, people rarely—I don’t think you say rarely, I think they say people just don’t ask the right questions. What are the right questions we need to ask ourselves consistently in our business?

Analyzing Business Origins

Well, okay, about your business, where is your business coming from? Most people have never analyzed the origin of their business, and it’s a two-pronged question: where new people are coming from and where repeat business is coming from. Because this is trite, but the 80/20 rule is probably true. Probably 20% of your customers are bringing you 80% of your business, but you’re not treating them special in two ways: acknowledgment or offering them more. If you know that one kind of a customer has a tendency to buy more often, higher tickets, you can program them to even more purchases. You can offer them products and services that not normally would be offered because they’re too expensive to stock or produce. You might find it’s like in Realtors, it’s funny. I analyzed them, and they knock on doors and they run ads and they do referrals and they do this. But when I ask them to go back and analyze regressively where the origin is, they’ll find that 80% of their new business came from one or two categories, and yet they’re not discriminating. They’re spending the same or less time on those categories they do on the rest. So the one thing is you can’t optimize till you put the greatest effort, and the great idea is getting the best highest best use of your time and your opportunity. Where do…

Going Deeper with Questions

You get the best leverage on yourself and your business. I think you ask lots of questions, and you keep going deeper, and you ask as specifically as you can. So give me an example. When you say going deeper, what’s your organizing principle for going deeper?

Well, I’ll give you an example. I interviewed a number of Realtors one time, and they were very successful; they’re in the top 2% in the industry. I said, “Well, what’s your primary mode of selling?” And they all said, “Referrals selling.” And I said, “Well, that doesn’t mean anything.” I said, “Well, tell me what that means,” and I started going deeper. How do you get a referral? Well, I asked them to give me somebody. I said, “Well, what do you say?” And they were startled; they said, “Well, I never thought of it.” I said, “Well, what do you say to them? How do you do it? How do you position it? What do they say back? What happens then? What do you do after that? After you ask them that, if they don’t do it, do you follow up? If they do it, what do you do? Do you go back for more?” I just kept going deeper and deeper. And the trick is to not be very specific and challenge yourself to specificity. Go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Key Questions for Business

Coming back to the three questions that every business person needs to ask consistently, you start out with the first one, which is where is the origin of my business, where is it really coming from. What are the other two?

Well, there’s a couple of questions, alright? Where is it coming from? Where could it come from? It’s a similar question. Most people have no idea where their highest and best source of new business is. I mean that in a geographic, I mean it in identification, I mean it in an approach. Number two is, who stands to benefit more than you by your being more successful? Most people don’t ask that. It opens up lots of possibilities. First of all, the customers, if you understand results. Second of all, suppliers, because sometimes you may be, relatively speaking, a greater beneficiary to a supplier than you may be 80% of the business they may be more motivated to help support you in growing your business, to run ads, to co-op, to advance money, to hire or cooperate on salespeople, to bring in if you don’t have the money or the interest in doing that. Great, of course.

Number three, who’s in a position who already has my customers and has already sunk an enormous amount of effort, time, money, and action to get their goodwill and would be in the perfect position to recommend, endorse, or make them available to me with a positive predisposition. I can give you lots more questions, but those are three codes.

Leveraging Goodwill and Reducing Risk

Well, give me two more, major role here.

Okay, what other ways can I benefit from the goodwill I have with my customers in an ethical and beneficial manner to them? And one more: what ways can I better reduce the risk of the transaction, thereby getting more people lowered in their resistance barrier to take advantage of my product or service the first time?

That leads me to a very important concept. Let’s talk about risk reversal. How important is that? What is it, and how can any business use it to see an improvement in their ability to bring customers to the table initially and then continue to buy in the future?

Well, first of all, how important is it? Well, do you want to stay in business, and do you want to be competitively superior, and do you want to be obscenely wealthy and successful? So, first of all, that sets it up. Understand this: in any business, well, in life encounters, but in any business encounter, one side of the transaction is always being asked to assume all or more of the risk than the other. It may be done explicitly, it may be done implicitly, it may not even be consciously being done. But in every transaction that ever occurs in business, and probably in life, one side is always being asked to take more of a risk than the other. To the extent you can…

Risk Reversal and Providing Value

Recognize and acknowledge that fact, and you can eliminate, reduce, or even make better than risk-free the transaction on the part of the prospective customer you’re trying to induce to sample or avail themselves of your wares. You own the business. Let me give an example because it’s from the 19th century, and it’s a wonderful little story.

A man wanted to buy a horse for his daughter. There were two horses for sale. One man said to him, “Buy the horse, take it home. If you don’t like it, bring it back, and I’ll give you back the money.” The other man, who understood risk reversal, said, “My horse is kind, gentle, good. But I would say that it’s my horse. Why don’t we do this? Let me bring the horse to you. Let your daughter ride the horse for 30 days. I will even bring you the oats for the horse. I will come and send my son to clean up the debris the horse drops for the 30 days. At the end of that time, you decide whether the horse is suitable for your daughter. If it is, I will come then and ask to be paid. If it is not, I will come in and take it away from you at my cost. Now, which would you buy?” No question.

Well, I mean that’s a little bit graphically maybe, but that’s the essence. Whenever you can, down here’s the irony: every business really guarantees the transaction by and large because if there’s a problem, they either make good on it or they give the money back or they give a replacement. But they sweep it under the carpet. I teach people to bring it to the top, make it a condition, make it a powerful, very specific aspect of the selling transaction. And not in the way of saying “satisfaction guaranteed.” That’s like saying service quality dependability. I believe you denominate very specifically.

You would call it future-pacing the outcome one should expect. You give somebody a matrix or a discriminator to impose on what their benefit, what their results should be. You tell them, “Look, Mr. Robbins, if this service doesn’t make you 20% more effective, if it doesn’t reduce your this by 15%, if you don’t sleep the happiest night you’ve ever slept, if you aren’t more robust and healthy, if you aren’t this, if you aren’t that at the end of 30 days…” And this is a trick, but it’s an ethical trick. You have every right, if you like, to ask for your money back. It’s a very powerful way. I believe in giving a better than risk-free proposition to most of my transactions. Basically, I want to make it so my…

Remember I told you about the coin where if you send it back, you get to keep it, buy and sell, you get to keep the $100 worth of information, but you also get a $2 profit, right? I want someone to be benefited so that at the very worst, they come out ahead. For having at least taken a risk, they come out protected, advantaged, ahead of the game.

Belief Guiding the Process

What is your belief that guides that process? What’s your belief about people and what they really need?

Well, I believe two things. There are two kinds of people in business, or maybe three. The people who actually render an incredible service and know it but don’t tell it. The people who actually render a great service and don’t know it and don’t tell it. And there are people who don’t render a very good service or product. The latter you can’t do much with. They’re not going to endure because the market will find them out no matter what, and a risk reversal or guarantee is only going to help them the first time in the repurchase cycle of life. They’re going to get found out, and they’re going to fall. They’re not having enough value.

Okay, but the vast majority of people either do or can easily render such a superior service, or they can get their market to see them more distinctively or preemptively advantageous. But the only way to do that and make it easy is to acknowledge the fact that, “Hey, even though I know that what I do for you is a J-RAM service, even though I know what I do for you is going to produce a great outcome, it’s going to make you more prosperous, it’s going to reduce your expenditures, you’re going to spend less, you’re going to make more, you’re going to have more fun, you’re going to build more net worth…” You don’t know that. Even though I tell you 3,500 people who have experienced it, you should see for yourself. You don’t know it. So, I see it as my job, as my charge, as my…

Responsibility

Mr. Robbins, to allow you to avail yourself of it, to preview it, to experience it totally at my risk. Why? Because if it works the way I say, you’re not going to want to not continue. So I’ll be benefited. If it doesn’t, I don’t deserve to keep your money anyhow. And that’s the basis that I operate on, yeah.

Interesting Principle

It’s an interesting principle because I had a meeting recently with a gentleman named Joe Carey from Good Times Video. They’re the number one video producer in this country now in terms of actual gross, number of units, not gross volume. I think Disney’s a little bit higher than they are. They sat down with Walmart and said, “We want to put you in the video business.” And they said, “Here, Walmart, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll come in and do a great job for you. We’ll sell you a video for ten dollars, and you can sell it for fifteen.” And Walmart came back, “Sooner, you don’t understand our business. You’ll sell it to us for five, and we’ll sell it for ten. You’ll send it to us, and you will not charge us. We will not give you a penny until we sell it. It’ll basically be on consignment. You will pay for the space in which you place it. Not only that, but you will guarantee a certain number of sales in that area by contract. And if we don’t sell a product, you will pay not only for the shipping to get here, but you’ll pay for us to ship it back to you.” So Walmart has a bit of leverage in a relationship.

Walmart’s Leverage

Now, when they first said, they also know that they’re gonna sell a lot of units for people because they’re… whatever the number of people it is that go through a Walmart store, it’s an insane number. And actually, I think you told me it was 60 million in a period of time. But anyway, the point of the matter is he came away, and he said, “It’s insane. We can’t do that. There’s no way to do that. This is… you know, we can’t be profitable. It can’t happen.” But he kept thinking about those 70 million or whatever the number, the actual number is, that go through a Walmart store every day. And he said, “You know, I could have trash in the front seat there, and we’re gonna sell it if you’ve got 70 million people walking by it.” So he began to think about this. And he came back, and again, I don’t remember the accurate number, but he represented to me that they went ahead. They said, “We’re gonna meet you in all these different levels, and we’re gonna be more than that. We’re gonna put a space. Since we’re paying for the space, we want to design it because this is our expertise. We want to be able to come straight here and put it, not go through one of your buyers, but design how people are going to see these videotapes, when they’re gonna be. That, we want to restock them directly.” Where the long and the short of it is, it costs them something like ten or twelve million dollars the first year. They made no money. The second year, I think it cost them seven or eight million. This last year, which I think is their sixth or seventh year in the relationship there, they made four… excuse me, five hundred million dollars in business with a twenty-five percent net.

Good Times Video’s Success

And Walmart not only… if they serve Walmart so well, and they have the information technology, the POS technology to know the minute a videotape is sold, they know what videotape it was, what store, the minute it occurs, so they can keep track of what’s most popular and replace it immediately. But they serve Walmart so well that Walmart has given them all their CD-ROM business for the future. And Microsoft said they wouldn’t. They wrote a letter to… I had a chance to sit down with Bob Walton, his, you know, the son who’s taken over Walmart. And they sent him a letter saying, “We’re not gonna work through this Good Times Video with our CD-ROM business.” And they sent a letter back saying, “Well, you think we’re crazy, but a lot of people thought Sam Walton was crazy also. These people… not a service. And if you want to do business with us in all of our stores, you have to go through them.” So they have wrapped up that business by serving their customer, by doing, in essence, they were told what the risk reversal had to be, but they took it on, and they were willing to take what seemed like a loss in the short term because they… the same principle, you target the back end. Really, hundreds of millions of dollars. Ask yourself this question…

Evaluation of Business

method, then don’t buy it because you’re on your own.

Creating a Successful Business

The way you guarantee most businesses fail is to buy one without any market development, market advantage, marketing or selling built into it. Most people just buy a business. They say, “Well, it’s a great product, or it’s a great service,” but they don’t have a marketing plan. They don’t have a selling process. They don’t have an articulated system that will bring in more business than they can handle, because if you don’t have that, no matter how good your product is, you’re going to be out of business, because the real competitive edge today is not the product, it’s how you market and sell it, how you service it, how you upsell it, how you develop the back end.

Finding Joint Ventures

So, first, look for businesses that have customers that they’re not maximizing. Create joint ventures with them to offer extended products or services that integrate with what they’re already selling.

Evaluating Franchises

If you’re considering a franchise, talk to both satisfied and dissatisfied franchisees. Get the names from the franchise company and talk to other people who offer similar products or services independently. Model successful businesses or franchises. Always assess the marketing and selling plan of the franchise before buying, and don’t buy if they don’t provide adequate support in these areas.

Remember, it’s not just about the product or service; it’s about how you market, sell, and service it that determines business success.

The Purpose of Doing What He Does

I tend to end these interviews by asking people how they want to be remembered, but you’re going to be around a while, so I don’t know if I can ask you that question. You’ve got some spunk in you. But I’d like to know, why do you do what you do? And how do you want people to think about you or feel about you long-term and what you’ve contributed?

Jay Abraham’s Greatest Acknowledgment

The greatest acknowledgment I get is to watch people start smiling, to watch people become happy, to watch people change the way they look at their business, to watch people see their business as a vehicle they can make friends and impact others. That’s one reason. Secondly, certainly, I learn so much from others. I grow exponentially every time I help people because I don’t tell, I ask. I learn. So, it’s a combination. I believe the moment I stop growing, I regress, and I act rifai, and I don’t want to do that. I want to keep growing, and I can’t grow if I don’t keep helping because when I help, I do it Socratically, and you only learn when you ask questions.

That’s pretty much it.

Conclusion

Jay, I appreciate the time we spent together. We certainly spent more time than we thought originally, and I think you’ve given people a tremendous number of distinctions or answers. But hopefully, what you’ve done is sparked in them even more questions because, as you’ve said, that’s the way we’re really going to learn, grow, and expand. And I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

The Tony Robbins podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and hosted by New York Kerry Song. Sam Mathews is our executive producer, Heather Culbertson is our associate producer, Brooks Lero is our digital editor. Special thanks to Diane Adcock and Mary Buchheit for their creative review.