Speaker 1:

This is The Ultimate Advisor Podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful, and scalable practice. Each week, we'll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing, and your business operations, helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you've dreamed of. You'll be joined by your hosts, Bryan Sweet, who has more than half a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to hire, improve their operations and company culture. And Draye Redfern, who can help you systematize and automate your practice's marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast.
 

Draye Redfern:

And I want to sort of introduce Jay, because there's a couple of names that I will give you a see if you know, some of these companies, AT&T, Baskin-Robbins, Boeing, Coldwell Banker, FedEx, Microsoft, New York Life, Shell Oil, Century 21, Chevron, IBM, HBO, Toyota, GE, Levi's, Kawasaki, Lockheed Martin, Merrill Lynch, Holiday Inn, Planet Fitness and a variety of others. Hopefully you've heard one or two of those. So the only thing that I think that all of those companies have in common is that they have all worked with Jay. So have you spent any time in or around the marketing industry, you probably know that Jay is the most successful marketing consultant in the entire world. And I personally have followed Jay's career for much of the last decade. I've been a student of his for much of that period of time.

 I'd say probably about five years ago, we became friends and he's shared some insights that really up-leveled everything across my businesses. And actually the result of you being here is one of the ideas and concepts that originally originated from some of Jay's thoughts and ideations. So really excited to have him here. He's also the author of two books, great books, if you haven't read them or haven't heard of them. Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got and The Sticking Point Solution, both amazing books. Also, the marketing advisor to Tony Robbins, Jay leads basically a full day of Tony Robbin's business mastery program and an absolute privilege, a gentleman, a scholar, and always the best dressed person in the room. So I'm very excited to have Jay here. Jay, welcome my friend.

 

Jay Abraham:

Thanks Draye that was overly laudatory. I hope I [inaudible 00:01:50]. Because I keep pummeling my brain with coffee, I hope I can live up to the expectations, thank you very much. It sounds like you have a very, very impressive collection of professionals on, so I'm looking forward to the questions you ask, the issues we discuss and hopefully the content we're able to share and the knowledge we can transfer. So I'm here.
 

Draye Redfern:

All right.

 

Jay Abraham:

I'm only on my second cup of coffee of the day. You're ahead of me by a couple hours, so bear with me and you look very dapper and distinguished yourself.

 

Draye Redfern:

You got to keep up with the multi pocket squares like you.

 

Jay Abraham:

Thank you. All right, great.

 

Draye Redfern: 

All right, so we're obviously right now in a position of really interesting, I don't want to use the word turmoil, but lots of ups and downs, lots of uncertainty. Everyone here is a financial advisor or they work in the financial advising practice. So with corona, the ups and downs of the stock market, what are you recommending for people right now to stay adaptable, stay limber, stay cognitively open to new ideas and concepts. Is there anything that you're sort of recommending given the uncertainty in the markets right now?

 

Jay Abraham:

Well, I mean, the answer is, if that's the question, yes. Next question.

 

Draye Redfern:

No, what is it...

 

Jay Abraham:

I'm joking, I'm joking, I get it. So there's an integration that I recommend. My whole success denominator is based on me having been accidentally forced to travel way outside my industry. I think it's very important for your professionals to get to know another depth of their own clientele as well as studying all kinds of things outside their profession. But if you start learning what your clientele is doing, what their industries are doing, it'll give you at least a bigger context. What I always recommend, and this will be the sixth or seventh downturn I've ever advised people in, although this is obviously more profound and tragic. But the first thing you want to do is solidify your base. You solidify your base by understanding what value means to them and being very, very clarified and clear, really crystal clear on your ability to communicate and transfer it and communicating it.

 Number two is you try to get them, wherever possible, to introduce and refer you to as many of their equal quality people as possible. Not even to get business, although you will get business, but to secure your best reasoned expert perspective and opinion. And if you don't have a best reason expert perspective and opinion, and you're just basically pass through of what your company is doing, you better be able to articulate very clearly the reason why your company's knowledge, opinions and whether it's formulaic, whether it's big data and AI driven, whatever it is, why that is in their best interest today, more than any time ever before? People want to be able to trust the intentions of others in their behalf. Humans are silently begging to be led because they don't know what to do. They're as confused and as worrisome and as mentally paralyzed in many of any categories as you are, but they want very badly to be able to be led by somebody that they absolutely feel has their best interests ahead of their, not unlike this, whatever we want to call this, this conference, this collective of experts.

 You want to hope that myself and anybody else who has come before me and will come later today or tomorrow, or the next day has your best interest ahead of their own. So you have to be able do that and you have to understand that your clientele are not just investors or companies trying to preserve their 401ks or their retirement or whatever it is, you've got to realize that everyone you're talking to is a man or woman, oftentimes a father, mother, husband, wife, friend, lover, and that they have a spectrum of other issues going on that are manifest by what's happening. Financial concerns, obviously, in your bailiwick, health concerns, career concerns, success concerns.

 And the more you can expand your contribution to also impact the holistic side of them by, I have found, the more bonded, the more fortified the relationship, the more trusted you are. And I'll stop after the next thing Draye, but then you want to get into, there's a lot of soft skills people don't know about, and I'm getting probably way ahead of Draye's intention and his progression, and maybe the curriculum he wants to follow up for this, but there's a lot of soft skills that are maximized by understanding the power and the forces behind them. Trust building. Stephen M.R. Covey identified 13 characteristics of what he called high trust individuals, leaders, organizations, and when you manifest them properly and you really live them, not just think you exude them, but live them here and here and here and in all your actions, you can achieve up to 300% more impact, and that could mean mean more people referring to you, more of your team doing more, being more productive, being on the same crusade, mission, passion you are for the the other side's best interest.

 It can mean your clients basically trust you to do more of what you recommend. It can mean you having more authority in your community. There's other, other soft skills you need to master. We've done a lot of work on relevancy, most people don't understand that, there's some very powerful people, Draye would know, Sally Hogshead is masterful on how you are seen. Roger Love is masterful on how you are heard. Each one of those denominators has the ability to enhance by some really wild multipliers, really geometric the impact you make, the outcome you get, and I'll stop for a minute because I'm going to have some more coffee and wake up. I hope that was a decent start.
 

Draye Redfern:

That's actually a really good segue into my next sort of a talking point or discussion point is, one of your fundamental concepts, one of the concepts that you're most known for is the concept of preeminence, being that preeminent figure, being the one who, I mean, we've got many legal fiduciaries here, but the person who has the actual fiduciary duty with their best interests in heart, positioning yourself from a stature and a position of preeminence and being that preeminent figure in the marketplace. So could you just shed a little light around the topic of preeminence, how you define it and then how individuals can achieve preeminence?
 

Jay Abraham:

Sure. And probably some context is in order so that you understand how I evolved whatever I'm going to share and I want to just claim that I've got a lot more work cut out for me to keep taking it and iterating it until I get to sublime. But I had a client about 30 years ago, in the investment newsletter business, the investment newsletter business, operative word is investment, and they were doing three times that what their closest competitor was at the time, their closest competitor was Agora, which has become a very big company. And this company had three times the revenue, twice the average unit of sale, multiples of twice the lifetime value. And they had team members who were all on the same unified mission, passionately crusading in the best interest of their respective subscribers, their clientele. And they had many newsletters and they ended up selling for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

 But I did an exchange with them where I gave them a half a million dollars of my services over a week, and I got to interview everybody, including the architect of their methodology and their management and their philosophy and their culture. And I took about a thousand pages of notes from all these interviews and all these observations and all these conversations and discussions, and I distilled it into what I called then, and I still call it, is the strategy of preeminence. And in a nutshell, it's either a strategic philosophy or a philosophical strategy, pardon me, that should drive, govern, fuel, be your true [inaudible 00:11:50] for everything a professional, anybody who wants to be preeminent should do, it should be the basis of your culture, your positioning, your communication, your advertising, your selling approach. And I'll give you the high points, it takes about three hours to lay the whole thing out.

 But the first premise is, you consciously want to be seen in the eyes of your target audience as the most trusted advisor in the category that you want to be seen, as number one. Number two, you want to be the only viable solution they can turn to for answers, opportunities, protections, whatever it is you do in your professions, obviously investment is very finite. Number three, you want to have a very clear cut point of view, and you want to be able to express it clearly, powerfully and support it with a basis that allows your target audience to make the conclusions, not you. If you say, I think we should buy this and you don't have reasons why, reasons why is a very, very important thread that runs all the way through it.

 Next, if you want to be someone's most trusted advisor, you have a moral obligation, you have a responsibility, you have a privilege, pardon me, and you have an opportunity to never allow them to buy less than they should, never allow them to buy more than they should, never allow them to buy less quantity, equality combinations than they should, combinations would be probably more applicable to other kinds of professions, not because you're going to make more money, but because they are going to get a better outcome. You have a moral responsibility, I don't have it in front of me, but I'll give you an example. When I used to explain this in, I just wave to one of my sons, I've got all these kids home for COVID and I'm relegated to the wine cellar, which is great until the end of the day, when you're around wine and you want to drink it finally, it's not best thing in the world.

 I'm also ADD, so bear with me. What I was going to say, and I just lost my train of thought. One second Draye, because it was a very important. What was I just saying? Okay, you have the responsibility to, if you know that your contemporaries, your colleagues, your competitors are not going to give as qualitative, as enriching, as protective, advice, ideas, and expert perspective, you have the moral responsibility, literally, to have them deal with you and not your competitors. Not because you want to kill the competitor or you want to be the most successful, but because you want to make the biggest difference and you know you can. If you don't know you can, you better figure out how to rethink your positioning, your communication, et cetera.

 I was going to say, what I used to do at seminars was I would have somebody in the audience, give me a half filled glass of water, pretend I have that in my hand. I've got a big bottle of water, but it's not half filled. And I'd say, pretend you, you who's watching came into Jay Abraham's bottled water shop and bar, and you asked for a half a glass of water. And I gave it to you knowing fully that you need seven and a half more glasses each and every day to fulfill your cellular need, make your brain operated, keep your stress level low, keep your system operating, every organ performing, allowing you to sleep your best, look your best, live your best. And if you came every other day and got eight glasses, and I didn't make sure you knew you needed eight in between, whether you got them from me or not I have the moral responsibility to make sure you are aware of what's in your best interest. That is one of the responsibilities, obligations, and privileges of being preeminent.

 In addition to that, one of the most important distinctions, I'm just giving you the high points, is you, in your mind, and I doubt if this is a big problem for most of you, but it might be. You always refer to the people you deal with as clients, and you need to understand why. If you look up Webster's dictionary definition of a customer or a patient, is not that elevated. A customer is somebody who buys a commodity or a service. To call anybody a customer, you're saying, "I am nothing more than a commodity." You want to always call them a client. But you want to know why and you want to have the meaning that is behind that, clearly and powerfully indelibly embedded in your brain, which if you look at Webster's, I believe, that the definition is it's somebody who's under the care, the protection, the wellbeing of another.

 It obviously is fiduciary, you are a fiduciary, but sometimes being a fiduciary gets abstracted and obscured, and you don't really understand the implication and the profound responsibility and privileges associated. You want to be able to communicate in ways that clearly resonate with your target audience. And the best way to do it is with metaphors, similes, stories, analogies, because the mind works best that way. And the proof of it is anybody on this video session that is religious, doesn't matter your religious belief, but parables are the way that they always get their message across, the same thing for you, it's the easiest way. You analogize what you're saying, what you're suggesting, what the problem is, what the the world situation is, to metaphor simulates.

 The next is you shift your priority and you stop falling in love with your profession or your office or your company and you fall in love instead with the clients you serve and you live with the very clear cut, transactional appreciation of your work being deployed in their life and what it means to them, not just today, but what that retirement preserved and growing is going to mean to them at 65, what it's going to mean to the company, as far as what they'll be able to do for their employees, what it's going to mean to anybody long-term, short-term, whatever that the relevant realization is.

 There's a lot more, but that's a good start. Oh, in terms of clients, you actually have three or four gradients of clients. The very first one are the people who pay you. But the other two categories are the people you pay, your team members, your vendors, you are your advisors. You want them all unified, you want them all to be on the same crusade, the same mission you're in, and you want to make sure that you enrich them, not just financially, but your team members need to know that you're committed to their growth, their development, their success at a level that is very clear cut so that they will, in turn, contribute far more performance, loyalty, passion, collaboration. I can go on and on, but that's a pretty good... does that make sense, Draye?
 

Draye Redfern:

It makes perfect sense. I think that's a good perspective for a lot of people in this industry as well, because I'm a fiduciary and sometimes it just stops with that. But actually being able to look at there's so many other levels of depth to that, regardless of the legal implications around them.
 

Jay Abraham:

It's how your mind correlates. Yeah, it's how you see interaction and how you see the relationship that you are having perpetually, not transactionally. It really is. You want to be their greatest advisor for life. And for life means not just transactionally, that the dealings you have, but anybody in their life that is relevant to them, they should always feel very comfortable referring them to you, not even necessarily to do business, but to get your best reasoned expert perspective before anybody they care about makes a decision irrespective of whether they do business with you or not. Although the majority will obviously, if you operate preeminently, so I might a lot more into it, but that's the essence of it.
 

Draye Redfern:

So I think one of the things with preeminence is it's definitely a higher level thinking concept as far as how you actually go about viewing your business, your employees, your vendors, your clients. And I guess, one of the things that we've talked a bit about over the last few months, is breaking down the three levels of critical thinking, strategical and tactical. And so a lot of people like to focus on the shiny objects, the tactical stuff. But can you talk a little bit about, of like why actually taking the time to think and really dialing in the critical thinking around concepts like preeminence or other concepts are so important?
 

Jay Abraham:

Most people don't know that most of the great achievements in life for people are intangible not tangible. And if you understand that these, what I'll call soft skills, the understanding of high-performance distinctions, that the vast majority of the people in an industry, i.e. your competitors don't even grasp number one. Number two, if you're going to dedicate a life to a career business and your hopes, your dreams, not just a financial enrichment fulfillment, but psychic and purpose driven and contribution are tied to it. The more you elevate yourself and extricate yourself from just seeing yourself as a generic, whatever you are, a financial advisor, an attorney, whatever, and the more you can mentally self articulate the dimensionality of what you're doing and connect it, the more powerful you will perform and the more powerfully you will resonate, number one.

 Number two, now with research and analysis, there is all kinds of irrefutable evidence that practicing these softer elements and adding them to a very, very competent expert business practice will propel your business up by orders of magnitude and more rapid order than you can imagine, because each one of them separately, not combined, has the ability to add 5%, 10%, 100%, 300% more performance to everything else you do and how you are seen. Next, and I think very importantly, you talked about critical thinking, I think there's also consequential thinking, which is probably an offshoot. Most people don't really understand probability outcome, action, reaction, look at physics, expand, contract, they don't look at the concept of growing or dying in all facets of their, in your cases, professions. And the more you understand implications correlations, you can mentally extrapolate how different things produce different outcomes.

 The more power you have, and the more absolute advantage you have. And all things being equal, assuming you want to operate preeminently, assuming you have more value to create, and I'll talk about value creation in just a moment, it just it's axiomatic. Why would you go into doing anything where advantage is not really weighted in your behalf in a very competitive arena? So the more you understand where advantage comes from the more you command and control absolute advantage in whatever you do it, it is actually math, you're going to get a better outcome. You'll win, the other side won't. You'll win more often than not.

 We have all these different denominators that I've come up with over the course of my career, one of them is called the 12 strategy pillars, and don't ask me to reiterate all of them, I have to look at them, I've come up with so many over my career. But one of the factors in it is making success a natural part of everything you do. And that seems again self-evident, and yet, when I look at things people do, actions they take, tactical mud on the wall, episodic things they do, I'm going to give you an example in a minute. I shudder because they do not make success the natural part of everything they do, they make failure, or at least marginal outcome, a higher probability, just because they don't either think clearly, or they don't have a context of reference.

 I learned very early in my career, thank goodness, two interrelated forces, optimization and variability optimization means getting the highest and best use of, now you're going to dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank and put a bunch of bullets, bullet time, bullet opportunity, bullet access to the market, bullet prospects, bullet clients, bullet media, bullet relationships. I could go on and on. You can't get absolute optimizations, highest and best use until you have a context of understanding of maybe not all, but about a spectrum of higher performing alternatives, options, and opportunities/possibilities that are available to you instead of, or in addition to, or enhancing, whatever you're doing right now.

 Most people in your business get a very large percentage, unless you don't have any advantage value or perceived distinction to your current clientele, you would get a reasonable percentage, maybe all of your business, from referral or word of mouth. And yet thinking critically, thinking consequentially, thinking strategically, I asked people, "So how many referral generating strategies do you have in play and in place?" In place means it's always in readiness. In play means every time you have an interaction that's appropriate, you're executing on it. And most say, "Not even one." Because I've worked with over 1,000 industries, Draye, and everyone, not just companies, I've seen, it was 93, now we've got 150, one, five, oh, different referral generating strategies systems, approaches, concepts that can be used sometimes for direct clients, sometimes for indirect, meaning ones that are inactive, sometimes it worked properly executed with prospects that don't buy, they could be act activated outside.

 And if you don't do any of them, because you don't know about them, but you waste time on anything else. Facebook speaking to cold groups, all these other things, it is very illogical. Consequential thinking, critical thinking says, you owe it to yourself, whether you currently understand it or not, to learn highest and best use theory. And then once you learn it to constantly be reevaluating, there's a great, wait, oh boy, I'm having a bad day, I might take a moment and go get some more coffee in a minute.

 There's a great quote that I live by, but I've modified it, I'll give you both the quote and my modification. It's from Socrates and Socrates' quote is that, "A life unexamined is a life not worth living." My modified quote, is that a business or in your cases, "A practice not constantly examined and reexamined from every impact point every element that can be correlated, measured, quantified, and improved and is not constantly remeasured is a practice not worth owning. Because same time, same effort, same salespeople, same advertising, same interaction, same client base can produce so much higher yield if you understand higher performance alternatives and options. So I'll stop for a minute [inaudible 00:00:30:12].
 

Draye Redfern:

So one of the things I wanted to ask later on you sort of referenced on it is referrals. So 150 different strategies, give or take, depending on the nature. Given that it's largely financial advisors as a whole here, are there two or three that given all of the compliance and FINRA and SEC regulations that you would recommend more than anything to this particular audience?
 

Jay Abraham:

There's so many, but I'll give you a couple that are benign enough that they wouldn't be impacted. I'm not an attorney, but I don't think FINRA would be even relevant to the ones I would give you. So the first one, and it's a very bold and daring one, but make referral generation a condition of doing business with you...

Jay Abraham: 

A referral generation, a condition of doing business with you in the future. Turn yourself into a referral-generating and referral-based professional who, when any new clients come to you, before you ever accept them, before they ever accept you, it is duality. Pardon me. You clearly communicate with them that you are a referral-driven or based professional practice and you prefer putting all your time, effort, resources into knowledge, research, understanding skills, personal training, team training, analysis. Things that are going to pay off so much higher for your clientele than marketing for you in an exchange for you putting all your concentration in their behalf.

 You ask any new client before you commence other relationship to understand exactly what they should expect from you, and you enumerate it, "I'm going to formulate with you, not just for you, the best reason, most high performing outcome appropriate investment strategy, or portfolio, or whatever, or mix, or investment classes that will serve your interests the best because... And you can expect me to constantly have your best interests at heart. Any changes, any opportunities or dangers, you can expect me to alert you early in and discuss it with you. You can expect me to always deal with you as if you were my father, mother, husband, wife, children. I will always put your interests ahead of mine, meaning I will not try to oversell, undersell you, sell you something I don't believe in my heart," is a wise and prudent, if that's what we're going for, or a meaningful justified speculation, if that's what we're going for.

 "You can expect me to care more, do more, be there more, and the same is true of my team members. And if we fail to do that, I don't feel we deserve to keep your business. But if we do that, I expect within six months of doing it, and you seeing the impact and we can't control markets, but we can control how we help you manage and maximize whatever happens in the market short, long, depending on our portfolio strategy. Once if an after we do that for you, we would expect every six months for you to introduce to us at least one equal quality colleague, friend, co-worker, employee, employer, church member, who would benefit by having a high-level, no-nonsense, non-theoretical discussion with us about their current and future investment requirements and get our best reason, perspective, opinion and recommendations, whether they end up doing business with us is irrespective."

 "We just want you committed because you feel we care more, we do more, we protect more, we enrich more. And as long as we have that as the basis, we would love to have you as a client and we give you our commitment that we will be long-term, always focused on what's in your best interest." That's sublime if you can do that, there's one, Darren and it's very powerful if you can do it. If you can't do it, then what you do is, in your interactions with your clientele at intervals, you share scenarios that are happening with new clients that come in or with different clients that you are doing different things with because if you have a portfolio... Most of you, maybe some of your very unified and very singular in what you do. But most of you have different portfolios, different goals, different parts of the growth or the client evolutionary continuum that you're dealing with.

 So you have a broad spectrum of different occurrences, scenarios, interactions and issues going on. And you share anonymized some of those things constantly with clients that are not really involved with you in those so that you share them. So you say, "Today I helped a young professional get started and he only had a $100,000 and we pivot this. And I realized that I should tell you that if you have young professionals that you know of, you should encourage them to. Me and you keep doing things like that." Those are two.

 A third one is, and then this to me is pretty cool. You... Well, I'm going to give you four because you asked for three, but I'll give you one that's extra one too. And I'm just off the top of my head. These are just a few and I'm not going deep on them. But another one is, if you recognize what I said that your clientele are not singular, they have a holistic side to them, their hopes, dreams, fears, problems, health, weight, happiness, stress management, balance, sleep.

 If you basically started doing interactions with them on this more expansive aspect of the human condition, and you invited them to invite anybody else they knew that would benefit also and you talked about anything, how to lose weight, how to sleep, how to manage adding state balance, how to be happy, all the things that are by-products of the problems that are really prevailing and pervading today. And you just very subtly said, "Bring any friend, anyone on and we'll have a discussion. And if anybody wants to talk investment business, we'll do that at the end, but this is all about making you happier, healthier, more successful, having a more balanced life." Whatever, that's another thing.

 The fourth one, which is really cool is, and we've done this for clients where in a very short order, we built a 1,000 influencer external sourcing network that loved our client. We've done it in so many different professions. It's almost laughable. But if you realize today that the people on this, whatever it is, this conference, this series are not the only entrepreneurs professionals, organization heads that don't have a clue that are scared, that are uncertain, that are struggling, stuck, trying to figure out the meaning of sort of business school forward life. And you identify a dozen, two dozen, five dozen, 10 dozen, and you contacted them in your community, if that's where you're targeting and your industry, if that's what you're targeting in your category, if that's what you're targeting.

 And you just very much acknowledged that, "We have to stick together. You are someone that I respect in our community. You've been in it a long time. I want to see your business keep going and growing. I'm sure that at least I know that I would be this way, that you would benefit and appreciate all the help you can get. I'm going to provide you continuously with ideas and knowledge that I think will help you, whether there is storm, get your business going and growing again." And then you realize that you all are on this again, whatever it is, video conferencing series, because you inherently have a distinction in the back of your mind that correlates expert knowledge with higher performance.

 Ironically, and amazingly, the vast majority of entrepreneurs and professionals do not see this. The proof of it, any of you who are old enough to remember bookstores. When bookstores, physical bookstores, existed and the same is true if you go online with Amazon and see. But there would be, maybe one or two full aisles on psychology or hobbies, or any of a number of things. And in the back of the bookstore, there'd be about this much space on management, marketing, selling, business growth, because most people just don't invest in that. So if you were the one that invested in getting information and you get tons of stuff, my stuff, anybody's stuff. We've created packages for our clients to do it that I created, but it doesn't have to be mine. But if you kept disseminating to them at intervals, really great knowledge, which is very simplistic, but they don't know, "I've got the three ways to grow a business. I've got the power path. Then I've got the strategy pre-eminence, I've got all kinds of things."

 And there's people out there that have consultated selling, they've got branding, they've got all kinds of soft skills. And all you did was scrape what's out there and share it in intervals and tell them that you're doing this for their best interest. You have no ulterior motive. That you would hope over the course of the relationship with you, that they've found you to be a such value and distinction that they would want, sooner or later, sometime in the future, to refer people in their life that had the need or the desire or the circumstances to you for your best reason and perspective. And you did that every week, you added five or 10 companies, or are professionals in any kind of service that you were contributing to. By the time you did it, six months you'd have a 1,000 and it would be all over. I can go over and over. I have done it for a long time, but does that help, Draye?
 

Draye Redfern:

Immensely. There's a lot of things there to unpack as far as just different strategies or different ways of how it works because I know that there's a lot of individuals who they may be a referral only practice, but you're exactly right. There's in place versus in play. And there may be one thing that's in play and maybe another one that's in place. But both aren't really being utilized to its full capability or potential. So there's definitely some good insights there. You did mention about also value creation.
 

Jay Abraham:

Yeah. I'll talk about it. Can I have one minute everybody. I use peppermint to keep... In the morning to keep my brain a little bit bizarre. To keep my brain function and you don't want to watch me do it because I put on my nose and ears. I need one minute to do that and to shift. I've got a bottle of water that I have to escape the video for a moment to access. Can I just have-
 

Draye Redfern:

Okay, fine. Absolutely fine.
 

Jay Abraham:

I'll be right back everybody. I'm not leaving the premises. I'm just exchanging different fluids that I have here. I want to get regular water from sparkling. And I want to do a quick dose of peppermint.
 

Draye Redfern:

Darren in the chat says, "I'm not a doctor but I have patients." I like that. That's funny.
 

Jay Abraham:

That's very cool. That's fun. Thank you. I'll remember that. Thanks Darren. Now, are your viewers all over the country?
 

Draye Redfern:

All over the U.S. And a couple international in Southeast Asia, I think Singapore and a few other countries down here.
 

Jay Abraham:

How Cool! I used to go to Singapore all the time, so I'm very fond of the Singaporeans and Malaysians and all the people in Asia. They're very quality people and they have a thirst for knowledge, which is very unique and impressive and distinctive and more people would benefit. Now, I might sneeze because I've got peppermint all over myself, but I am back with my real water bottle now.
 

Draye Redfern:

All right.
 

Jay Abraham:

Lets go.
 

Draye Redfern:

Stanley says, "Hi there, I'm from Singapore." Hi Stanley.
 

Jay Abraham:

[inaudible 00:44:12].
 

Draye Redfern:

So value creation. And there's also... There's before preeminence, and I want you to weave it in as you see fit. But I'd like for you to also, at some point, in time as we progress, share the ice and hot story and sort of some of the things that were done there to take it to the next level, whether that's with value grades or something else [crosstalk 00:13:30]. And if ever one thing has ever been powerful.
 

Jay Abraham:

I'll be happy to. Absolutely. Okay, let me just talk a little bit about value creation because there's a lot of misnomers. Any two people having the same discussion are not hearing the same thing. Nor are they conjuring up in their mind's eye, the same imagery, the same reference or referential interpretations or value creation there. You have to get, first of all, alignment in how your target audience, and that's not necessarily macro, it might be micro, an individual if you have a broad spectrum of different scenarios that you address. But how will they see life?

 And the only way you can really do that to be really meaningful, pardon me, is... And most people do not do this, is to understand, to examine, explore, understand, appreciate, respect, but acknowledge that you see how they see life and whether you agree with it or not, because you got to start where they're at. Then if you are going to express your value proposition, you have to make sure that it aligns and resonates and is congruent with their definition of what value means to them. If there is incongruity or gap, you have to either come down to them or like a Suez Canal or that, or the Panama Canal that has a lot. You have to bring them systematically up to appreciating and educating them on what value really means. And you can't do any of this until you study and slow down enough to examine and understand, so that's the first thing.

 Second, if you really want to shortcut the process, I will give you another of my concepts. And it's called the amazon.com school of... You can call it school of business, school of marketing, school of research, school of penetrating the subconscious of your audience, ethically. And what it is, is this, if you are representing any... You can have any category you got, any concept you got. You can be growth, you can be preservation, you can be whatever you stand for and you can stand for different things to different people, rather than you trying to resonate, sort of... What's the word I would say? Rather than you try to communicate value based on conjecture or guesstimates. The easiest way to really understand exactingly or... By the way, I forgot. One of the things in pre-eminence this ties together, it's not if at any moment, if you want to put it into words and express to them what they're trying to get closer to or away from or achieve in terms of outcome, benefit as clearly and powerfully, as humanly possible and ways nobody else ever has.

 So it will instantly resonate with them and they'll go, "That person really gets me." You can't really do it that easily... I talked about variability earlier. You do things one way, it produces X. You do it another way it can produce three or four times X, including getting people to trust you more, buy more, say yes, agree to use you, become your client, all these things. So back to the Amazon school of business, depending on the categories and scenarios that you address in your profession, you can go to Amazon to start with, and I'll take you down the levels of additional access.

 And you go to any books for the last three years that have been written categorically, in any of the categories or scenarios that you are focused on. You will look at the title and the subtitle because often those two are bigger factors in denominating success than the content of the book itself. Sad reality, but a great vehicle for you because if you scrape all these titles and subtitles, we have the best sellers, the top 20 for two or three years, you will get language patterns that resonate massively.

 You go through and also scrape off all the chapter titles because half the time, they're very, very on the point and resonate, what people want, what they don't want, what they... Problems that they're struggling with, they don't know they have opportunities, they're not aware of that exists. Then after you've done that, you go to the reviews of books and you look at the zeros and the fives. Zeros are ultimate negative. Fives are the quantity assassin positive. And the reason you're looking at these, is when people are passionate, positively passionate, negatively passionate. Their subconscious overrides their conscious and their subconscious is masterful and clearly, and dimensionally articulating what they didn't like or what they liked from graphic imagery that is profound. And If you... As long as they don't say vulgarities, it's really quite amazing. When they're negative and disappointed, they've been let down, they'll say it very clearly.

 When they're positively expanded and they've had revelations, realizations, epiphanies, insights, they'll say it in ways you probably never heard. So you scrape all the negatives on one category, the positives that are now there, and now you have the ability. You overlay and see where there's commonality amongst a lot of people over 20 books, over three years in each category and a lot of differences and you put them in priority of orders and the hierarchy. Now you have languages you can use when you're talking to people in your emails, in your ads, in your presentations. And most of it, I don't think, but I'm not an attorney would go against all the rags, but you can pass them by.

 The next category of examination would be discussion groups. The next category would be just looking at all your direct competitors and look at also the investment classes and the various forms, whether they're funds, whether they're, whether they're companies that people write about and take all that language pattern, and you can talk for it against it in ways nobody ever has. And you'll be resonating at a level of distinction that subconscious just loves, so that's... I've probably given a lot of stuff. I don't know if anyone will do it.

 One of the things I find is that in my career, just as a reference frame, I've been blessed to be exposed to 200 experts. None of which came to me for help with their expertise. They came to make their expertise for far more financially remunerated. They wanted it to be denominated better, understood better, contrasted better, articulated better. But I had to learn all these expertise before I could do that. So I have an understanding of a lot of complex stuff, and I'm usually able to distill it and explain it in such elegant, simple terms. That's true power in the impact of what I'm sharing. Sometimes is not fully appreciated by the people I'm sharing it with until they don't do anywhere close to what they could, but I should probably underscore, not to be arrogant or egotistical, but what I'm sharing, I have applied worldwide. It's generated over $20 billion of profit increases and success stories. So it's pretty powerful stuff if you believe it. If you don't believe in, it's not.
 

Draye Redfern:

So I can actually attest to the amazon.com School of Marketing. This is a book and everybody who's here has gotten a copy of this. I wrote this Jay, in four days, built the outline off of that exact concept of pulling all of the ideas from Amazon, other people's chapter titles, seeing what other people were complaining about, raving about, ranting about, and then built it off of that to make the outline to actually write that.
 

Jay Abraham:

Keep talking. I love that phrase. I'm going to write it down. Keep talking.
 

Draye Redfern:

And that was one of the most time-consuming things, was figuring out exactly what the market wanted in order to shortcut the time it took to actually create it because I think a lot of us, we want to have marketing, we want to have message and we want to have differentiation. And that at surface sounds really cool and we need to do it because every other person out there is simply just saying, "We want to help you plan for your financial future and its sorority, planning for your financial future." It's all saying the same thing.
 

Jay Abraham:

It's platitudes.
 

Draye Redfern:

Exactly. Now obviously there's not so much we can say with the legal regulations and such. But a perfect example of like, I guess a way around that is what Brian and Brittany have in their planning business called The Dream Architect. So it's a trademark process, but The Dream Architect really exonifies and exemplifies how you can create a simple differentiation like that could be profound and have a profound difference. So I have to attest to the Amazon, School of Marketing. But also on that same sort of vein, using that content to create something, to make something different, and differentiation seems to be this hot topic. So is there anything that you have that you can shed some light on ways to actually differentiate ideas or concepts or just ways of looking at problems differently?
 

Jay Abraham:

Yeah. If you understand the source of most breakthroughs in life, and there's so many categories of breakthroughs, business breakthroughs, intellectual breakthroughs, paradigm breakthroughs, perspective breakthroughs. They come from outside of an industry just as an example and these are old examples. Fiber optics was not created for telecommunication. It was created for aerospace and borrowed FedEx. It wouldn't be here if Fred Smith didn't borrow what's called The Hub-and-spoke distribution process from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's the way they used to clear checks overnight. I don't know if they still do it. Rogaine came from I think pimples. Viagra was heard either. The ballpoint pen or the other idea it came from the other.

 So the first thing is to travel outside your industry and study all kinds of things that maybe aren't your primary interests. It's barely been what denominated my skillset, my ability and my knowledge base, is just trying to be constantly curious about everything you don't understand. Look at as many different businesses industries, see how they do things, how they say things, how the leaders differentiate and see how you can try to adopt it without the need for compliance. Some things, obviously you need FINRA to say, "It's okay." And some things you don't because they're not that volatile.

 Second is, be able to denominate what it is that you do differently and everyone does something differently. The third is, to understand pre-emptive marketing. Pre-emptive marketing means... Well, I'll tell a story. It's a long story, but it really underscores part of my gain. So this is a true story. It's taken from one of the influencers that I studied for years. He lived in the '30s, '40s and '50s, and he was the pre-eminent direct response marketer of his time. And he was very, very, masterful in understanding variability and correlation and all kinds of testing and things like that.

 And he turned to many, many struggling businesses around overnight, very, very broad spectrum of household names today. And back after prohibition, he was called in by Schlitz Brewery to try and help them grow. That the market after prohibition where 20 or 30 beer companies all saying the same thing, "Our beer is pure, our beer is pure, our beer is pure." And there was no distinction, no differentiation. So he's called in and he had a belief that he would never try to formulate anything until he had first reobserved the business.

 So he goes and travels to Milwaukee and he gets out of his car. And the brewery was right on the banks of, I think it's Lake Michigan. It's one of the great lakes. And this is back in the '30s, I think. And the water was very clear and clean. And yet right off the banks, 500 feet, the brewery had sunk to 5,000 foot deep artesian wells. And he was just curious as he can be, "Why didn't you just draw right from the clean waters of the Lake?" And they said, "Because the water we need to make our beer needs to have a certain mineral content that is only achievable by coming up through all the limestone and the other sediments and all of the things that exist in all the different layers of the earth score all the way down."

 And that was fascinating. Then they took him into the brewery itself and they showed him the mother yeast cell that was the result of performing something like a 100... Excuse me, 1,136 different experiments to find the perfect embodiment of bitterness, sweetness, form, whatever coloration that made their beer taste the way they wanted, look the way they wanted, drink the way they wanted. Then they took him into the distillation room and there were nine foot wide glass plate walls, and they would take that same artesian water and they would vaporize it and liquefy it and vaporize it and liquefy it, I don't know, five or six times. And he was just incredulous and he said, "Why are you doing that?" And they said, "Even though it's got the right mineral content, it has some negative factors we have to eliminate." That fascinated him.

 Then they gave him a tour of the bottle sanitizing department where they took these glass bottles before they were filled. And they sanitize them something like nine times, twice under 2,000 degrees steam, once under chemical. I don't remember the other methodologies. Finally, they took him to the bottling part and they showed him with all those procedures in place, they still rejected one out of every 10 batches for various reasons.

 At the end of the tour, this masterful marketing person said, "You've got to tell that story to the public of how you make your beer." And the management of the brewery said, "But that's how all beer is made." And this man, his name was Claude Hopkins said, "But the public doesn't know it. The first person who tells the story gets preemptive advantage." Everyone else would just be, "Me too." He did that for them. They were number nine in the market and honest to goodness, six months later and for the next 10 years they were number one, just because of preemptive marketing. We've used that for lots of things, but just telling.

 

Jay Abraham:

... we've used that for lots of things, but just telling facets, factors, methodology people go through, the training of individuals. They've got 57 Ph.D. mathematicians analyzing it. They've got the top people in the world from wherever on their algorithms. Whatever is true, but nobody knows that dimensionalizes the fact that we have a great research team. So what, we have... we get advanced knowledge. We have better trading [inaudible 01:02:36] a half a second. Well, why is that important? The more you tell what you do differentiated because most people don't really understand anymore the depth of meaning of different words or different elements that affect positively or negative the outcomes of their life. So that's another answer, Draye.
 

Draye Redfern:

I love that story. I've heard you tell that story so many times, so I love listening to it every time.
 

Jay Abraham:

Yeah, well, it's a very powerful story, and it has as much relevance to each and every person watching as it did 30, 40, 50, 70 years ago.
 

Draye Redfern:

So, around that, I guess, same vein. A lot of people are hesitant to market. Maybe it's the lack of differentiation, maybe it's, I've done it once, and it didn't work. So it's never going to work. So I'm never going to do it again, which obviously is not the best mindset. But any ideas or thoughts as far as how to maybe reshift the mindset around marketing.

Jay Abraham:

Sure.
 

Draye Redfern:

And as far as opening up people's perspectives.
 

Jay Abraham:

Yeah. Well, the good news about marketing its more science than art. People think it's very complicated. It really isn't. You need headlines that denominate the biggest benefit, advantage protection, enhancement. You need body copy that identifies reasons why people should either deal with you, talk to you, examine and evaluate your offerings or your message. You need proof, which can be achieved by either sharing if it's legal, your performance, or identifying what other people say or enumerating the kind of people that deal with you or your parent company, or describing the kind of qualitative infrastructure and team members. You've got to basically make an offer that is irresistible and can be that we'll evaluate, I'll do this. I'll do 87.4 hours assessment and give you my best reason, perspective, along with the reasons why I recommend it.

 And then you need a call to action that is compelling and non-threatening. Most people don't do any of that. You also need a distinction of understanding. Most people don't understand what is called allowable cost. They don't look at what's called marginal net worth or lifetime value. So they either spend too much or too little on marketing, advertising, and they don't have the right criteria of outcome expectation and value perspective. So I'll give you a quick lesson. So you ask about that Icy Hot. I'll tell the Icy Hot story because it inter-relates to this. So one of the big success stories I had early in my career, 35 years ago, probably more than that, 40, was Icy Hot. I was working for a company that bought and sold and repurposed lots of old-line products in the mail-order patent medicine field. They bought this old dying company called the JW Gibson and had a product called Icy Hot.

 Icy Hot was an analgesic balm like Bengay or Mentholatum for arthritis, pardon me, rheumatism, et cetera. It was almost dead. It had a thousand buyers, and they were just thinking the company was going to be buried after they bought it because they bought it for another reason. But they started looking at these factors I'm talking about. Correlations of buyers to buying. And they found, I'm summarizing, that every time they got 10 new buyers, first-time buyers, eight of them purchased once a month, monthly added [inaudible 01:06:53] literally forever until somebody would come up with a cure for arthritis, bursitis, rheumatism, or they died. That wasn't the only distinction. Further events showed that literally, half bought a second product every month from the catalog. That alone wasn't the final distinction. Almost half of the second group that bought two products bought twice a year or more in bulk for themselves and others. That analysis, when it was all calculated, was that every time 10 new people first-time bought a $3 bottle or jar of this stuff, they were worth $50 a year forever.

 Even if the two of them didn't buy, just because of analyzing all the buying history with that piece of information, we didn't have an advertising budget, but we had allowable costs that was huge. We went to radio stations, television stations, publications, magazines, and we offered them the ability whenever they had unused, unsold advertising to run ads for us and keep us all the money and even paid them a premium above that. And we took a loss of about this is a very nominal, 55 cents that was a dollar with what we paid them in the override. And they thought we were crazy, but we understood that every time we put out a dollar, we were getting back 50 in year one and that we couldn't really put out $49 and made nothing in year one because we were going to make that same 50 in year two and three and four. And that premise got us literally 500,000 new buyers and built the business in less than 15 months to where it was sold 40 some years ago for $60 million to a major pharmaceutical company.

 We've done the same thing. I had a client one time in the of fluid transmission business. That sounds very sophisticated, but all it is is PVC plastic pipe that in factories are used to transfer and move chemicals and bottling its syrup and agriculture it's irrigation. And they wanted to break through and they'd never looked at lifetime value, marginal net worth. And I gave them a formula and they came back, was a regional company, and they had five salespeople and it turned out they never understood that every time they got a brand new buyer or worst case, that buyer was worth $200 profit on the first transaction. Every time they got a new buyer, worst case, not best that buyer was worth five transactions a year at $200 profit. Every time they got a new buyer, that buyer was worth about three years of relative value to the PVC pipe company.

 So if you do the math, new buyers are worth $200 profit times five transactions in year one, times three transactions are $3,000 of profit. Then I asked what they were paying their salespeople, and it was 10% of profit. So I said, "I bet they're not really generating a lot of new buyers because they don't look at it long-term, they look at it static, and it's only worth 20 bucks. So they don't want the pressure." And they said, "Yeah." I said, "Why don't you try this. Give them, as long as they keep their performance with their existing clients equal to what it's been averaging, give them a hundred percent of the commission on the first new buyer's sale they generate for every new buyer they bring in." And they were two brothers that owned it, and they were [inaudible 01:11:00], "Why would we want to give away $190 of profit." Which was their retention on the profit on that first deal?

 I said, "You're not. You're investing $190 you never would have had for the 90% of the $2,800 of profit you absolutely will get or more over the next three years." And they did it, and their business increased 500%. This is the basis of these stories that they're most people in every business, and I would think you all don't look at lifetime value of what... the game you're playing is not singular transaction. What is somebody worth over a year, over two years, three years, whatever the duration? What are they worth, including referrals? What are they worth, in all kinds of, whether it's commission, whether it's fees, whether [inaudible 01:11:53] all basis and then correlating, how does that value correlate or aberrate, meaning it's not in alignment with what you're willing to invest, to bring new ones in. And when you align, then you look at another category, and that is different sources are usually worth different amounts.

 We talked earlier in this discussion about referrals. Very, very simply, a referral generated buyer normally buys quicker. So, [inaudible 01:12:26] cycle is much faster and easier. Buys more. More profitable. Negotiates less if you have negotiation in your transaction. So it's more profitable in two ways, dollars and yield on every dollar. Buys more things. So they might have bigger portfolios or different kinds of portfolios. Buys more often. They might add more constantly. Buys longer. So they last longer and refer more people, and they cost nothing. And yet most people don't really delineate that that's a much more profitable and desirable source than Facebook or whatever else you do. And you need to know that all sources are worth the same. The idea of one size fits all is ludicrous. I used to be many, many years ago, in the referral generating business.

 I worked for someone, it wasn't my business, but we generated six million investor leads. So I understand the investment market pretty well. And a lot of these big companies and a lot of the regional companies back then, they would just say, "Yeah, we'll pay $50 a lead or a hundred dollars a week." And I would laugh because all leads aren't worth the same. All sources aren't worth the same. All categories of leads aren't worth the same meaning why they come in. What their portfolios are. What their interests are. I mean, and most people would spend the same relative amount of time on it makes no sense. Anyway, I can go on and on because this is what I do with private clients for a living.
 

Draye Redfern:

I think there's a lot of value in that because it's so easy just to, "look I'm spending this dollar on marketing, and I'm not seeing an immediate return or the referrals," whatever. But it's a longer-term view in how you actually see the outcome of these sorts of things and your perspective of it. And that sort of changes a lot. So, I mean, I'll share a brief story. Just something that you made us realize several years ago, Jay, in the other business that I'm a part of. The retention was 91% year over year when people come back 91% year after year, after year, after year. And so, I mean that retention rates are incredible. And so, we could actually then afford to really breaking it down with a lot of what Jay is saying is we could go out and afford to actually lose money on year one because we knew the retention rate was so high and then make money ongoing. So we could pay upwards of $2,000 to $2,500 to get a new client in the door-
 

Jay Abraham:

Perfect. Yeah.
 

Draye Redfern:

... every single time. And at that, when you realize those things, and you realize the lifetime value, it changes the whole perspective because then we can outspend the people tend to one. Then we're omnipresent. They're getting direct mail pieces. There's the online advertising. Whereas the next person down the street selling the same services to the same marketplace only have a smaller, shorter-term perspective on it. And don't see the full gamut, I suppose, of everything that there is when you look at it at the bigger picture like that. And I've got to credit a lot of that to you. It was just taking exactly what you said and looking at it from a different lens. And I think that everyone here if you can get a client, obviously their retention is going to be very high for financial advisors because most people, hopefully, stay assuming you've got good communication. You're staying on top of them. You're acting like a fiduciary. You're the preeminent advisor, all of those things. So [crosstalk 01:15:59]-
 

Jay Abraham:

And also, excuse me, Draye. But they won't just stay. But unless they're static, which I don't know this because there was different scenarios represented, but they should be more and more profitable and grow bigger and bigger every year, depending on how markets perform, obviously. But it seems like the game you're playing is weighted in your behalf once you bring them in the door.
 

Draye Redfern:

Absolutely. That's exactly it. There was a question that came in while we were sort of just riffing on that last little segment there that says, "Do you believe someone can learn how to see and understand consequential outcomes? If yes, what are some of the exercises that could be practiced to help learn the nuances of this?" Any thoughts around that consequential outcomes?
 

Jay Abraham:

Well, the answer is certainly yes, but you have to really be able to sort of not forensically, but maybe forensically or anatomically reverse engineer actions, reactions, scenarios, and look at things that go on in your life or your profession. Look at experiences you've had. You got to start by not just saying, "I want to be a critical consequential thinker." You got to say, "Okay, let me build." If you talk about AI, for example, you give it the most scenarios you give it. The more it's able to expand its understanding of probability and outcome, right. But it's got to start with input. You don't just say, "Okay, AI, tell me what the consequences of this are." You got to give them some basis to start really interpreting, examining, and formulating. So I would say you start with your own experiences.

 If you are fortunate enough that you're in any kind of an organized, either company, group, a syndicate, whatever it is, where you've got lots of other people doing variants of the same thing. You pick their minds, and you ask them to share with you typical scenarios. And you try to use your ingenuity to come up with all kinds... What happens with this kind of a prospect? This kind of a buyer? This kind of a market fluctuation? This kind of an uptick? This kind of a downtick? And you come up with a massive spectrum of scenarios that you start by answering the questions yourself. Then you add to it. All the answers you get from all your colleagues whose mind you'd pick. And now you overlay them, and you got a hell of a start. Don't you think?
 

Draye Redfern:

Yeah, absolutely.
 

Jay Abraham:

[inaudible 01:18:45] I never discussed that, but that you remind me of that one because that's a great strategy. I should use it myself for my clients.
 

Draye Redfern:

So everyone who's here is either the principal or they're the second in command.
 

Jay Abraham:

Okay.
 

Draye Redfern:

So we're not... it's the decision-makers. It's the visionaries. It's less implementers to a certain degree. So...
 

Jay Abraham:

Okay, that's better. I mean, you should be. I mean, the greatest role you can play is not being the tactician. You should be the strategist and the decision-makers because if you change your strategy. You change your results massively. You change your marketing. You change your results massively. You change your ideology. You change your results massively. You change how you use your access to the market, you change your results massively. You change your business model, and you start saying, "Hey, we can either lose money or we can go to the bank and finance it because, by the time we get to month nine or month 12, we're in the money big time," and you change your whole results. I mean, you ought to be the thinker.
 

Draye Redfern:

So, and with that being said, with the principal or the second in command at, in attendance. You've got a variety of trainings and thoughts around leadership, like how to be the most effective leader amongst an organization like that. Given a lot of the craziness that's gone on over the last six months, we found that now there's a lot of opportunities to be generated. So we've got some clients that have grown by tens of millions of dollars in assets under management over the past few months because their previous advisor hit under a rock. Didn't reach out, didn't get ahold of them. There was no preemptive marketing. Communication was very low. But there's also been a lot of uncertainty in the job place with people uncertain if they're going to even have a job still. So any ideas or just concepts that you could weigh on around leadership in this crazy time?
 

Jay Abraham:

Yes. But would you allow me to answer a different question that might be more short-term opportunistic.
 

Draye Redfern:

By all means.
 

Jay Abraham:

Okay. So I have had the interesting, good fortune of being prevailed upon by a lot of different diverse people, representing a lot of diverse industries and parts of the business puzzle. And the last couple of months to talk about my non-linear look at the whole concept of how do you get unstuck? How do you ethically capitalize on a downturn and get yourself in turnaround? And there's lots of answers. But rather than leadership question, I would rather address a different question. Are there unique windows of opportunity that exists right now? And the answer, macro, is yes. Micro, you have to course-correct and extrapolate and interpret it and adapt and adopt it to you. But I'll that, that a rat, tat, tat share with you a quick sort of a spectrum of four or five that anybody here could at least think about and luxuriate in their mind after we're off this.

 So the first one is that to the extent it is ethical, there will never be as great an opportunity to collaborate with other businesses, media, complimentary companies, association, organizations, influencers, either community-wise, regional national, industry-wise that exist right now because everyone is uncertain and many companies and many individuals are hurting really badly. If you can identify who already has access to your audience and you could either ethically compensate them. And I believe, but I'm not an attorney. You can do that for leads, not for sales, but check with your attorney or with FINRA or whatever. And you can work with [inaudible 00:21:19]. You can endorse them, they can endorse you, whichever the two works. There is a vast spectrum of opportunities out there.

 I mean, one of the sleepers is all these restaurants that are either struggling or out of business, the high-end ones, existed up until COVID by either the owner or the maître d' or the front of the business person being charismatic and having a constant trusted relationship with high-end people. Now that restaurant's either out of business or not doing very well, but you could get a hold of the restaurant tour and have him or her introduce their clients to you, either for a special situation event. It could be a dinner that you fund with their clientele. And you pay the restaurant to door dash out food. You can do all kinds of things, but there's all kinds of entities, businesses. In the beginning of COVID, as an example, 80% of the radio stations were down 60 to 80%. I did work with hundreds of them, giving them access to all kinds of deals locally and nationally that they would run ads for in exchange for so much a lead or so much as sale.

 And I did things like organized events that they sponsored that were virtual like I'm talking about. So if your creativity can run wild, you can engineer all kinds of things. The second opportunity is acquisition. There are many weaker and tired players in fields that are either competitive or complimentary. Things people buy in addition to, instead of, before, or after that you could acquire on a pure earn-out. Where you don't pay any money upfront because consolidating it, and now that you understand lifetime value, you might want to operate that at a break-even because it feeds you. Or it extends the profit of your existing clientele as long as you can legally do if you're not restricted by your connection with your parent company and you can buy it, or you can just not buy the business. Buy the assets, the buyer base, the name, the URL, phone number, PA people that are well connected or service-wise, and you consolidate it into yours.

 In fact that you already have infrastructure, you might make a very marginal business, more profitable, or a marginal business far more strategically valuable because it either feeds you clients or it adds and as an extension at the end or compliments at the point of sale for you. The next is really a sleeper. I don't know what the numbers are today, Draye, but it was something like 30 million the last time I saw it. People who are employed, and many of them, the vast majority are low skilled. And I've got great empathy, but I can't really talk about that for this conversation. But a surprisingly number are super skilled. And they got unemployed and became unemployed. They got terminated. They got furloughed, whatever it is, because of one of two reasons... three reasons. But most of it is not incompetency. Most of it was the role got consolidated or eliminated, or the role costs too much.

 But what people don't realize is if they don't have a non-compete or if they were from a different industry that compliments you, they have relationships that were very hard one to some of the most desirable decision-makers and influencers out there that are just being wasted. These people are now on unemployment. They were making 150, 250, 350,000. Now they're struggling on if they're still getting unemployment. They're being asked to take jobs that are far under their income level, or they're not getting job offers because there's tons of them out there. You can find them on LinkedIn and other such platforms, and you'd go to them not to offer them a job but offer them a way to introduce you to their relationships that are now just sort of being a sunk cost and that they don't even know have value. And you can take those relationships and turn them into clientele, into referral sources, into JVs.

 The next category is just salespeople. There are so many salespeople out there that got unemployed because either they were not the top salespersons in their business and the business constricted so that the owners or the management eliminated the bottom half or what they were selling is not as desirable now. So it was less need for as many salespeople, but these people could be useful to find prospects. And you could, I believe, if you check with your counsel, but if you're paying them for prospects, not sales, I would think you could work variable with them. And I go on and on, but that's a better question than leadership [inaudible 01:29:12].

 I think leadership comes down to having certainty in an uncertain time. Not certainty that you have the absolute answer, but certainly that you can convey to both your direct clients who pay you and your indirect clients, who are the team members you pay, that you will find the right answer. That you will find the right path no matter what the future lies and have enough ability to convey that absolute certainty in their behalf, in the company's behalf, on the client's behalf, and then commit to what it takes to be able to fulfill on that belief system. And that if you're going to express that to your audiences, be committed to whatever the actions necessary to do that. So there's another answer for you, Draye.

 

Draye Redfern:

I like it. I like it. One of the conversations that we've had a lot with our clients, just things that have come up and been submitted over the last six months to a year or so, is the topic around millennials. There's a lot of varying opinions. There's a couple of things have been said in the chat, also, is that millennials are lazy or they're entitled or whatever else. But what's interesting is that we're seeing more and more of the financial advisors start to change the tone or the rhetoric around that because they recognize that millennials, they're not really spending money like maybe the older generations may have. They're accumulating more. And they're starting to actually turn into a client base that may actually be worth pursuing. Any thoughts around the idea of, maybe it's marketing trends, maybe it's marketing insights, around this next generation of millennials?

 

Jay Abraham:

I had for about three years, a client who was one of the top influencers of millennials. And he wrote a book called I will make you rich. And it's a really hypey sounding book, but it was actually very foundational, and it taught people how to live below their means and how to invest. And I think he sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the book. And he also, he [inaudible 00:29:43]. He had no interest in monetizing investment. He sold training programs. And I think he's doing very, very well. But I think you need to speak to where they're at. And rather than me giving you a three-minute answer, I'll give you a connection back to an earlier recommendation.

 Why don't you do some research or pay somebody to do research and identify everybody online that you can find that is teaching millennials, qualitative, financial management, because if you can find them, you can see what they're doing, the language patterns, the progressive information or resource offerings they're using to get people in and progress them. Get on their database and study them. See what books are out there. And there are people who are masterful at selling to millennials, and there's experts and consultants, and they probably charge a lot. But I think if you do some home... the big problem that I find with most companies, most entrepreneurs, most professionals, and it's actually fascinating, not good or bad, just clinical.

 

 

Jay Abraham:

Fascinating. Not good or bad. So it's just clinical. When we get a client, we have a 200 question assessment we send out. And one of the categories of the assessment is asking just a fascinating spectrum of questions on what intelligence and knowledge and understanding they have about their direct and indirect competitors. And most of them have none or very limited. They've never really studied their competitor's business. They don't know what they stand for. They don't know their positioning. They don't know how they attract, how they convert, how they sustain. They don't know what they do online, offline. They've never had anybody that bought from them that they've ever interviewed. They don't try to interview prospects who don't do business with them. They don't interview prospects who come to them from other competitors or other providers to see what it was that other provider did in the beginning to get their attention, whether it was action or sourcing. They don't want to ... They just want to make more money, but they don't really want to do what I would call the critical thinking and consequential thinking work.

 

Draye Redfern:

So another thing I figured I wanted to add is one of my favorite trainings of yours is the seven ways to out think, out perform and out earn your competition. It's definitely a favorite of mine. And there's seven, I guess, frameworks of it.

 One of the things, the first two in particular, number one, maximize what you already do. And number two, multiply the opportunities that are available to you. So we sort of just touched on number two. But maximize what you already do, we sort of touched just briefly on it earlier. Optimization, some of the things that you should optimize.

 So off hand, ads that you run, whether maybe it's listings, PR, referrals, selling systems, or the selling process, emails, or email marketing to be optimized, distribution channels that could potentially be optimized. Anything else that you think would be relevant to optimize as a professional in this environment?

 

Jay Abraham:

Sure. I mean, at it's ultimate level we've identified as many as 51 leverage or impact points in a revenue system that most entrepreneurs or professionals don't even know are impactable. And so, I mean, there's all kinds of things.

 I talked about testing, but I didn't give really a lot of variability. We've changed a headline or a subject line or the first paragraph or two of what somebody says when they have interaction with somebody on the phone, in person, on a webinar, however you would do it. And seeing variations as much as, well, it could be as much as 21 times. But normality is hundreds of percent different.

 We've changed what they send out and how they send it out, and sometimes doubled and redoubled conversion. We've changed what their positioning is and changed it. We've changed what we'll call risk reversal, and you can always put a risk reversal and even if you're not able to return their money, you can do risk reversal before they give you money. And there's a longer explanation than I wish to go into on this.

 You can, when you talk about maximizing, if any of these people were a client of mine, and I'm not soliciting them, because I'm relatively expensive, but if they were, what I would do is start with everything they're doing right now and how it is doing. And I would systematically go through each impact point from the start, all the way through past when they acquire them at post-acquisition, including people that become inactive or prospects that don't buy. And I would look at what they do, how they do it, how I can make what they're doing better, different or powerful, replace it, expand it, enhance it, add to it. Because they're already doing it, so it costs nothing to make it perform better. And as many as ... most of them aren't going to have 51, but everyone has eight or 10. It's not just the macro.

 If you've got all these transactional activities going on continuously that you don't recognize or acknowledge. The first one is if you've got new people coming in, when they come in, who handles them, what is said, how do you set the stage? How do you initially establish what you stand for? Why you stand for it? What standing for it means, what they can expect, the outcome, what are the stages you progressively take them to? Up to and including a closure, what do you do afterwards? How do you communicate? How do you fortify the relationship?

 How do you or don't? Do you use the relationships to introduce you to other sources, whether they're influencers, whether they're referrals? How do you use your marketing? How do you test your marketing? Is your marketing complying with all the high performance denominators headline that conveys the biggest benefit? Positioning that establishes the uniqueness and conveys the benefit, advantage, protection that you, or upside, the story. I mean, there's all kinds of things in just the marketing itself.

 If you send emails out every week or month to your database or your prospect list, there's a, what's called, the so what question? Most of it is crap. I mean, it's not that valuable. It's not that distinctive, it's intrusive. So how can you make that wonderful weekly or daily or monthly access into their minds and their houses or offices pay off much more. I can go on and on.

 But there's a ton of stuff that most people are never taught to look at. There are ways to quantify and examine and analyze performance levels, engagement, conversion, time spent, all kinds of things. And all those, each one of those, I mean, one of the things is, that I learned, how to work on the geometry of your business, because each of those impact factors improved even 10% or 15%, are not 10% or 15%, it becomes geometric, it's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10.

 And we have a philosophy we are advocating now in all the things we do for clients or trainings, Draye, that is basically when you understand that there is geometry available to you in every business, every profession, every thing you do. And you understand that you can operate, and I'll give you something that blows people's mind when I'm done, it's ass backwards, because I should have established it earlier, but I'll finish on my theme. When you understand there's geometry in your business, and that you always had the ability to operate exponentially, not incrementally. You will start demanding of yourself and your team that you always operate in the exponential zone, not the incremental zone.

 And I used to teach this in public when I could be on a stage. And I would have people come and I would ask them to shake my hand. And they would do the typical, today it's more of that. But it used to be this. It was very benign and non-memorable and non-impactful. And I would ask the audience how great of an impact that would make on them. And they'd go ... very little. Then I'd have them do it again. And they would extend their hand. And I would turn it and cup it for a minute and just stop. And then I'd ask the audience how much more memorable that was. We would do it another time. And they would do that. I would do that. And then touch the shoulder. And in 99% of people, that's an enhancement. 1% is freaked out. And I asked that, it took the same amount of time. It had a different impact.

 Then we'd talk about things like communication by telephone. Almost everybody on this video session does something by telephone that has a direct impact on the outcome of the financial performance of their practice, their business, whatever you want to refer to it as. And I make a laughing joke that most people seem shocked when they get voicemail or a gatekeeper. When in fact that is 90 plus percent of the time what you're going to do. So rather than go, "Ooh, Draye, it's J Jay Abraham calling about the portfolio management discussion you wrote me about. Call me at 555 1212." That is so benign.

 If you know that more often than not, you're going to get a voicemail or a gatekeeper, you should prepare a very provocative and strategically well-reasoned, critically and consequentially thought out message you are going to leave. That is also evocative meaning it's designed to not only stimulate, provoke and get them to think about things they have no referential established understanding or definition of. So it gets a state change, they have to think about it. And a evocative, something that they're going to want to take an action on. And if they don't respond, you want to leave every subsequent message progressive on that because you're having a conversation if you strategically understand it.

 But there's dozens or hundreds of issues like that in the course of a revenue system that nobody thinks about. And I was going to tell you that I recently introduced, and this is not a sales pitch, I'm just telling you, this is what we do now. I recently introduced a whole new theorem of a business growth, and it's pretty cool.

 It's called taking your business profits and performance beyond exponential. And the basis is, over the course of my career, and you very aptly introduced five or seven of the 30 plus categories I've been able to identify, and I'm thankful you don't ask me to expound on all of them, because if I don't have my talking points, I don't remember clearly what they all entail because I've done so many. But I always struggle because I've created over 30 categories, not techniques, but categories of geometric profit growth. And it's usually easier to grow bottom line than top.

 And I always wondered what is geometry on geometry on geometry? And for years, I wondered but I never looked it up. I finally looked it up and was stunned and staggered positively to find that mathematically it's a given that you can take performance five gradients above exponential, it's called hyper operationalizing. And you can do pentation, hexation, hepatation, octation, I can't remember what the other -tation is.

 But when you can operate well beyond exponential, you should never allow yourself to operate, or your team to operate, in the incremental zone ever. Because you can do the same thing, same time, same effort, same action, same 40 hours or whatever, and get so much higher of a current and a compound yield. And it is driven by levers. And this is the evolving methodology that we are now focused on. But it's pretty cool.

 Because if you look at a personal life, a personal life is enhanced and been advanced and it's really driven by levers, screwdrivers, jacks, light switches, wheelbarrows, cranks on windows, popped up caps, but we don't recognize that there are tons of levers we can access to catapult, to multiply, to make much easier but much, much greater our capacity to perform in our business life, that which we can instill in others.

 So it means a lot of cool things. I hope this is helpful.

 

Draye Redfern:

Very much.

 

Jay Abraham:

But I see we're almost out of time. So I want to make sure I'm in alignment.

 

Draye Redfern:

Yeah. So we've got a little time for Q&A here over the next few minutes. In the meantime, I think it would be remiss to not mention the preeminent professional, and what that is. So the long and short of it is Jay's had an amazing depth of knowledge, breadth of knowledge, in a variety of capacities, critical thinking, strategic thinking and tactical thinking. So what we've done is basically collectively taken all of Jay's most impactful concepts that could serve or benefit professionals and aggregate all of them into one basically platform and way to best serve everybody.

 So it's something that we're sort of proud of to have been involved. And I think it's really an amazing product. The culmination of a lot of things that Jay has done. If you want to learn more about it, this is the not so subtle subtle pitch, just go to preeminentprofessional.com. So it'll be like right there. You can plug in the URL up top. And that'll take you right to it. So if you want to learn more about it, go learn more about it and book a call, see if it's a fit.

 And that's one of the more affordable programs probably out there. But really excited to have done that together with Jay. And happy to be a part of that. So that being said, Brittany, I know that you've aggregated some of the questions individually straight to you from the Q&A. Anything in particular that you want to bring up and have Jay address for the next 10 minutes or so?

 

Brittany:

Yeah, so I'm seeing a couple trickle in here. One of the questions actually about the preeminent professional, they're asking if it's specific to advisors, Draye, do you want to elaborate a little bit on that? And I can interject.

 

Draye Redfern:

Yeah, the long and short of it is it's the culmination of a lot of Jay's concepts, but they're geared for professionals. And a lot of it is more than just advisors, but I would say 99% of it would benefit advisors in particular.

 

Brittany:

Brilliant. Okay, great. Let's see. So make sure that you are dropping your questions. You can send them directly to me in the Q&A, or you can place them in the chat and we can share them with Jay while we've got his captive attention and brilliance right in front of us. So please send them through as we're sitting here.

 Jay, I know I've been studying your material for quite a while now, thanks to Draye. Draye is actually the one that introduced me to Jay, and through Joe Polish's genius network as well. And one thing that I think is really interesting that you talked about is kind of the meshing of your sales and your marketing and how you need to be really careful not to have two standalone pillars there. Can you talk a little bit about that for our audience? Because I know that that will definitely incite some ideas on how people arrange their strategy within their business.

 

Jay Abraham:

Sure. Well, I mean, if you just take it in its simplest form, Brittany, you don't want silos. Everything, I mean, this goes to strategy, most small companies under $50 million, their strategy is to be tactical. They do a lot of intermittent things, a lot of erratic things, a lot of episodic things that are not designed to integrate. And the purpose of a strategy is to have a long term, very clear cut, ongoing game plan, that everything you do integrates, advances and enhances that. And the opposite is normally true. The sales are not in alignment with marketing. There's not congruency. There's not feedback. There's not strategic integration. There's not critical consequential thinking. I mean, it's a bigger issue than just a three minute answer, but there's a short answer.

 

Brittany:

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. So one of the questions that came through, they're asking for geometric recommendations for evaluating a business.

 

Jay Abraham:

Well, I mean, and the opposite is you want to see how ... You want to, first of all, be able to see your business in more granular and nuclear sense. It's not just selling. Selling is a lot of stuff. It's how you access either inflow, outflow of targeted prospects. How you immediately establish leadership control, what it takes to go from outer peripheral trust to qualitative trust, to committed trust, to transactional trust. All the elements of communication. There's just a lot of stuff.

 First thing is, you have to lay out and isolate and identify all these impact points that are going on. So you know what all the levers are. Then you've got to find positioning congruency. Then you've got to question, am I expressing the highest and best positioning advantage or differentiation of benefit and outcome expectation that I can deliver to the target audience I want? Am I really targeting that audience? Or am I basically targeting a lot of non-prospects and I should be recalibrating? So there's just a lot of progressions, Brittany, but there's a start.

 

Brittany:

That's excellent. And we talk a lot in our teachings under ultimate advisor coaching on the attract and repel strategy. So a lot of what you're speaking to there is making sure you're actually speaking to the market that you want to serve. And so another question came up that may fall in line with that. Somebody is asking that as an advisory practice that is just starting out on marketing, so they haven't concentrated efforts there anymore, what are three key actions that they could take to have their marketing efforts be effective?

 

Jay Abraham:

And what are they, they're an advisor, is that right?

 

Brittany:

Correct. Yeah.

 

Jay Abraham:

And these are financial advisor, investment advisor, are they both the same?

 

Brittany:

Many of our following, our audience is wealth advisors. So they're looking at more of the comprehensive planning just versus transactional in nature.

 

Jay Abraham:

Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is reverse engineer the clients you have. If you're just starting out from scratch. Before you just go out there and run a lot of random mud. You got to decide what is the real sweet spot you want to target. Trying to be all things to all people in a world where there's so much formidable general and specific competition is ... If it's not a death knell, it is definitely a prescription for mediocrity. So figure out where you can be the strongest categorically, demographically, scenario, investment class, whatever the heck it is, outcome, expectation, whatever their strategic intention is, and start there. And then work backwards to look at everybody else doing anything like that, that's more vertical and how they're expressing it.

 I would monitor, if you're doing it localized, that's great. You can study people that are outside your market and see what they do, how they do it, go to their websites, get on their list, have them write you, have them ... If there's somebody that is not a threat to you, call them. And if they're successful and they're localized themselves, ask if you can model them. If you have to pay them a royalty or a fee for doing it. I would just start doing stuff like that to begin with. Recreating the wheel or starting in a vacuum, just throwing a lot of crap against the wall and wasting opportunity, cost, capital and human capital makes no sense. When you can think differently and more optimally about everything.

 

Brittany:

It's funny that you say the throwing crap at the wall, because we joke about that and how that's really a differentiator between the good adviser versus the great, is that you kind of migrate out of that just throwing it and seeing what sticks. I think we have time for one more question. And the last one that came through is, if you had to pick two or three things to focus on, to grow your business in today's world, what areas would you tell your client to start with first?

 

Jay Abraham:

I would start, assuming you have capability, competency, and performance excellence, I would want to be able to articulate and identify what that is. And I'd focus on referrals first. Because they are the loyal, best, most profitable. Then I would focus on intelligence gathering, the way we said it. And then I would focus third on how many ethical ways that we're compliant with FINRA, you could establish collaborative relationships outside. If you do that, it's all over after a year or so.

 

Brittany:

So good. Jay, every time I've heard a presentation, whether live or recorded, I have pages and pages of notes and just key insights that have added I know exponential value to all the different businesses that Brian, myself and Draye are involved with. So we cannot thank you enough for showing up here today, for sharing your knowledge, for sharing your collective genius per se with our audience. So Draye, is there anything else that you want to say before we wrap with Jay?

 

Draye Redfern:

Amazing as always my friend, some of the stories are just ... the geometric thinking is always just a good thing to be reminded of. So thank you for the time.

 

Jay Abraham:

My pleasure. If I may say one other thing is that my career is predicated on a desire on my part to not be intellectual entertainment. If you do nothing with what I've shared, it is almost shameful. Not because I'm that wonderful, it's just that what I've shared has produced such consistent and universal positive results for so many different people worldwide, and so many industries, including investment advisor, wealth advisor, financial advisor, and every other kind of ... I mean, I've done about every kind of professional imaginable. And this translates totally. But it only translates if you do something with it. Thanks everybody. Bye.

Draye Redfern:

Thank you, Jay.

 

Brittany:

Thank you, Jay.

Hey there. Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you're hearing on our Ultimate Advisor Podcast, don't keep us a secret. Share us with other advisors that you think would benefit from the messages that you are hearing. The easiest way to do that is just simply send them to ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. And if you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimateadvisormastermind.com. As always, we are so happy to have you here with us as part of The Ultimate Advisor community, and we look forward to a continued relationship.