How To Navigate Economic Crisis and Capture Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunities with Jay Abraham, Brian Kurtz, Dean Jackson, and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #372

I started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're going to hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter. You have a relationship with them, you know, different service businesses. And all of a sudden it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say, who is the joint venture or referrer that you can develop and establish a relationship with that can refer that business to you? And right now, that opportunity, I think, exists in greater levels than ever.

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Believe it or not, entrepreneurs are sitting on a gold mine right now. Learn how to uncover unique opportunities amidst a crisis in today's episode of the I Love Marketing podcast. In this episode, Jay Abraham, Brian Kurtz, Dean Jackson and Joe Polish break down some specific ways that entrepreneurs can generate cash flow, collaborate and maximize all of their assets immediately. They'll also share the value of looking outside your industry for answers to strategically set yourself up for sustainable and long term growth. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network annual event, then apply today for your invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com so Jay Abraham.

Is referred to as the $21.7 billion man and highest paid marketing consultant maybe in the world. A proven business leader and top executive coach in the United States. As founder and CEO of the Abraham Group Inc. Which is in Los Angeles, Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems in fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries and over 7,200 sub industries worldwide. Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business scenario and issue. He studied and solved almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity. And Jay's just a dear friend of mine, just a great guy and it's wonderful to have you here Jay. So what did I not say about you that really people should know before we kind of launch into it that.

I am a poster boy for adult attention deficit and I can go rogue very easily. I mean the thing to appreciate about me is I know very little about what all your people know about, but I've done a thousand different industries literally in my life, not businesses. And it gives you a really broad context of alternative realities, a myriad of different strategic ways to think. Business models, value propositions, monetization, redeployment and that's probably I'm imagining what you're going to want me to talk about or what you're going to ask or what we're going to discuss. So that's just a context. Don't think me being someone saying I know more about what you guys are specialists in than you do. I don't. But I know a lot of stuff that most people don't. That's pretty much it.

You know, me and you and Dean Jackson did a really good, great interview right when this pandemic started. And a lot of people have commented on how valuable and helpful that was to them. We put it on the I Love Marketing podcast. So Dean Jackson is here with us. And Dean, at some point, pipe in. You and Brian Kurtz have been friends forever. You're friends with a few people on here. And Jay, I believe your current consulting rates are 120 grand a day. Okay, so if anyone wants to hire Jay, he's available. Maybe. Maybe he's available. I'm just going to ask you, how should business owners be thinking about this crisis in terms of risk and opportunities?

Okay, so I'll share with you five or six really cool distinctions that I've talked about a little bit. So people might have heard it in some other forums, but they're really unique perspectives on what I'll call mental arbitrage. So the first thing is, I mean, this is very, very trite, but I think in terms of dyads and triplets. So dyads mean I want to divide and con. So there's two types of attitudes. There's reactive defensive readiness, and then there's proactive strategic, opportunistic, ethical, opportunistic preparedness. So let's assume that everybody we're talking to is in the latter, not the former. So what I look at are opportunities, correlations, implications, anomalies nobody else is receiving. So I think I'll go through this very quick, what I'll call five part distillation number one. I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity. By the way, If I look up, I'm just accessing my thinking. I'm not trying to be rude to anybody. I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity as wide, deep, and receptive as there is right now for doing collaborations, joint ventures, strategic alliances, endorsements, co branding, referrals of the most wide magnitude. And you can take me deep on anything you want. And I'm not talking about, and no disrespect, a typical Affiliate deal. I'm talking about much richer, deeper, much more involved and sustainable. Number two, there's never going to be as many companies that have been as ill prepared financially and are going to be against the ropes and in dire probability of either having to very barely make it or go broke. And they'll never be as big an opportunity to acquire. Not businesses, you don't need the yoke of liability, but the assets, the buyers, the prospects, the distribution channel, the URL, the phone numbers, any key personnel. Number three, and this is really interesting is that there Now, I think 22 million people unemployed. If you look at it, Joe, it's polarized top and bottom. There's a large number of unskilled people which for this discussion are irrelevant. But they're very relevant human beings, men and women, fathers, mothers, husbands, et cetera. But on the upper end they're super skilled. And why that's important is these are people that had hard won very deep relationships with key decision makers for their very, very recently previous employer, for very significant things. If you can identify them on LinkedIn, which you can, because I've already done this for clients and we've done tests that validated it and you can prove that your company, your product service is superior. If they do not have a non compete or if it's not a competitive product, they will never, because these people are making 2, 3, 4, 500,000 more and now they're sitting hoping to get unemployment which couldn't come close to paying their car payments. So if you can contact them, persuade them that your company product service is warrantable, they have all these relationships that they can feed to you and they'll never be receptive any other time in their life to doing something on a performance. And if they do well, they can earn themselves a career opportunity finally. And there's one more after this, finally. But finally, in these categories, there's a million and a half or so salespeople that can't sell something. You can recruit them right now to do any of the three things I just talked about or anything else imaginable on a pure performance. And that'll never be available to you in that way again. Finally, there's something that I call options trading, but it's not options trading like stocks. It's getting control of assets and access. I got a lot more things, but these are the five big ones. For example, if you came to me and said, Jay, I got this great idea, I want to do a Jay Abraham advisory letter. You don't do one and I'll take it out and I'll give you a fee when I started X, and I'll give you so much percentage and I'll give you a piece of the back end. You can literally take that, right. And flip it to somebody in the advisory business for a bigger amount and a bigger override. And there's all kinds of stuff like that, Joe. And that's the kind of things that I sort of function on, which are a little different than most people.

What's the largest audience that you have ever spoken in front of?

I don't know. 15,000.

15,000.

Okay.

I'm just trying to check, like, on an arrogance level, how arrogant do you think you are? Just because, you know, so many people all over the world think you're like just this amazing genius.

I don't think I'm arrogant as an ego. I think I'm arrogant about the concepts.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's a different. I think I'm misperceived. I really do.

I've known Jay for, like, I don't know, 25, 30 years, and he's mellowed. He's, you know, he wants to be arrogant even about his ideas. And he's a pussycat.

No, no, actually, I've gotten to know Jay very well. I think he's a really incredibly kind, cool, awesome guy. So, yeah, I wanted to just.

I just want to add one, like, specific, like when Jay was talking about his number one, where you've got, you know, the companies, like a chiropractor, for example, who has an office and he can't take patients, or he can, if he wanted to go one. One patient at a time, and he wanted to fumigate the office and he wanted to, you know, he could get away with it. But while he's doing that, slowly but surely, what Jay is, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about, because it was a chiropractor in my group that you coached Jay, and he wants to drop ship supplements for their pain. So he can't crack their back today. He can crack their back maybe a few months from now. So he free visit three months from now, but he drop ships supplements, pain supplements, or even more. There are companies, like with lasers and all this kind of stuff that don't know what to do. I mean, they can sell stuff online, but if they can partner with a guy like this who's got the network, who's got the funnel, so to speak, of all of what he's doing, I mean, partnerships are. I agree with you 100%. Jay. This is the best time to buy as opposed to make everything and you get to test all these different things that you might not go into those businesses anyway. It's brilliant.

Yeah, it's great, Brian. Thank you. And I like your beard. You look very distinguished. Joe, if you think about it, very interesting that everyone needs money and people are rudderless and they're trying to figure it out. I mean, there's a real sleeper that people don't think about. All these restaurants that are on the ropes that are closed, the independent ones, not the chains, but the independent ones have very rich, deep relationships with their clientele. And the more upscale have much more sophisticated clientele. They are great influencers you could contact to introduce all kinds of different products and services. And that's just. Just a singular idea. And I mean, I want to be very supportive and I want to bring to your audience as much as I possibly can. I was thinking about something, if you'll let me, that I would love to share about distinguishing between a superficial partnership and something very deep. And I can tell a couple stories when you want, if you want, and if not, I will shut.

No, no, do it right now. Because there are so many people that are viewed as influencers, as experts that present themselves actually having deep relationships with people when it's just a manipulative setup sort of game. So I'd love for how you make the distinction between superficial.

So let me start by telling you how we used to do what you would call an affiliate before the advent. And again, I go back, everybody knows that. Brian knows that when there were a lot of newsletters that were physical, but when we would set up a deal, and the one that I'll use as a reference is I had a very large gold brokerage company when the newsletter business was very high. And most people would just try to get the editor the personality to recommend them in a letter or a little blurb in the newsletter. I did not do that. The first thing I did was set us up as the recommended provider. And every time anyone ever became a new subscriber, they got in their new subscriber welcome package. A collection of materials we created. All about hard assets, all about gold, silver, the case for it, and even the case against it. So it was balanced. Number two. Four times a year we underwrote the cost of special edition newsletters that basically focused on hard assets. The outlook had epic, iconic people that would write, and they were really cool. Third is we funded quarterly regional events where we would bring an icon, we would bring the editor we paid for everything. And then we would bring our person fifth is a lot of people back then would keep mailing. Brian knows this until. Until they hit break even and break even would be two different things. For some it was imputing fulfillment, which wasn't that much. $10 a year for a 2, 3, $500 newsletter. Sometimes it wasn't. When they stopped, we would take over funding it because we got joint tenancy of all the names. I would change the headline, the bonuses, the risk reversal, make it a little tighter and we would basically turn it into viable and make money on it.

But.

But we get joint tenancy of the name when it stopped working. Because most newsletter promotions then I think Brian would affirm and maybe today too, they were based on the bonuses and we were in the gold business, which was lead generating. And lead generating would cost us sometimes $150 a lead before it was a deferred. Deferred investment. We wouldn't recoup for a month or two. So we would use the mailing piece for the newsletter stripped down to just the bonus, just to get leads at a lower cost. But we basically, it was sort of like the concep, the integrative concept of becoming an integral part of the relationship. But that didn't happen until we won very, very deeply the trust of the partner and that we protected them on everything. And I was very good and I think I still am pretty good at preemptively thinking through all the negatives, all the concerns, not just overcoming them, but blatantly bringing them up to show that we have already protected them. I can go on and on, but that's just one example.

Michael Middleton sent me a private question and I said, you know what, why don't you just bring this up and ask Jay directly.

So Jay, you just mentioned something about restaurants which struck a chord with me, but I've been struggling to think about how to use this.

But some of the high end restaurants.

In London have been sending out to their mail lists, recipes and that kind of thing, but then also linking out their food suppliers because the wholesale food suppliers, their businesses, same thing here, all.

The hotels and restaurants.

So in the world that some of the rest of us are in, I'm struggling to think of situations where I've maybe got clients or business connections where I could use the same kind of thing. Where are we talking about restaurants? Or are you just using restaurants as a springboard to some other industry application?

Just as a springboard? I'm not in the restaurant business.

I have a Financial planning business and a retirement coaching business. Okay. And so your clients are who my clients are.

So companies with sort of 4,000 employees.

And more, many of whom they've sort.

Of furloughing staff, but they're looking at redundancies. They've got people that they're going to.

Be taking on to early retirement.

It's a new business.

We had a face to face workshop.

Program which just got shot to bits.

And Michael and Joe, I forgot a big part of the first element that I've been talking about and that is whatever you do now, you want to identify what else people buy before, during, after and instead. And I can go into instead and you want to be able to make those products, services available to them also. Then you want to go to the next level, Michael, and think about this and think about what else they are buying decision makers for that the trust you create would be appropriate to introduce them to. And a lot of people are very vertical. They only think in terms of whatever they do and the transactional activity that they deal with. But if you think about the fact that that person in normal times is buying or influencing certain things, but in abnormal times, they're even new things. And most of them are indiscriminate. They don't know who to choose, they don't know who to go with, they don't know who to really pick as a choice or a provider. If you are in a position, you've earned their trust. That trust now can basically expand out to a multitude of different ways. You can very ethically monetize. And then there's two different ways to monetize now and in the future. If you know that it's only a matter of time between before certain types of products or services will be paid for, you can set them up now. You're going, you're going to. Most everyone on this call is going to need money. Unless they're doing fabulous, which some are, they're going to need money worse than six days, excuse me, in 60 days, than they do right now with the restaurants. Anybody here who might have a whole influence sort of chain to restaurateurs, I think you could go to a lot of them and introduce them to all kinds of qualitative people that their upper level type clientele would be very receptive to. And you have to realize one of the greatest, and you guys know this because I watched some of the discussion with people that are doing the virtual events. You're never going to have also the high level decision makers captive in one place for such a period of time where they are able, when you engage them, to be very focused. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting sort of adversity produces enormously unique opportunity if you understand how to first of all identify it and then seize it.

Let me say this too, because there's a few comments in here that, you know, Laura, who is from Milan, Italy, and is now in London right now, she wrote, I know personally restaurant owners in Milan who are working more than ever with the deliveries. And apparently they even make more because they don't need the stuff in hall.

Waiters and sommeliers.

Sommeliers. You know, it shows you how uneducated I am. I'm sitting there pausing, like, what is this word?

It's the guys who serve the wine. I just want to say something about restaurants because I was on the phone with Frank Kern not that long ago, and he said to me, if he owned a restaurant, he would hire college students and high school students who were around. Now, this is the granular idea, but I think there's a bigger idea here. He would call all the college students and high school students and he'd say, and that would be the pony express for delivery. Then you start looking at a direct mail campaign. I've been home, I was in Milan also. I've been in my house for like six weeks. And so I haven't gotten one menu from a restaurant in my town. And a lot of them are open, doing delivery now, that might not be strange, but I wouldn't even just. And that's just the menus. What about, you know, you have. You do some direct mail, you say, you know, I want to cook you dinner tonight. And it's a one page, it's a menu. It's got the key dishes from their restaurant. I'm just. I'm dreaming here. And they cross out the price and they give you a little discount. And they have a phone number at the bottom. And then the restaurant, being more proactive, gets the phone numbers in advance and goes out and calls those people and say, did you get my menu? I want to cook dinner for you tonight. And they repeat the message and they take an order. And it's like, I don't know, what if there was one restaurant in my town that was doing that? I would be ordering because I want to support them. I don't want them to go out of business. And I just can't believe that. And again, I shouldn't. I should believe it because they don't think like that. And it's Okay, I shouldn't say it that way.

Let me say this though, like, because the biggest thing I want out of this, I mean, I'm talking about restaurants from a jumping off point of the ideas that are being discussed here. But it's like, you know, the thing I mentioned yesterday, my buddy Mark Tarbell, who won Iron Chef and is a really great restaurant, he's been in business forever. And Akira Chan, who's going to be speaking earlier, sent me a video about a guy who owns a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles who is going out to the community and asking people to buy meals so that he can serve them to the healthcare workers. And so right now, I checked in with Mark yesterday and he's literally gearing all that up to not only do healthcare workers, but firefighters, police officers, people that are being of service. One of the things I really want to emphasize, and I'd love to have Dean Jackson jump in on this because Dean is really great at this, is that the thing I want people to take away from Jay is that people think of the value of their products and their services. And what you've always done forever Jay, is the value of the relationship, the value of the list, the value of how many years you spend to develop and nurture a relationship with a group of people. And so Abby made this comment. Restaurants are more for the social aspect, right? They could coordinate random zoom breakout dinners. And what I'm going to do during the next Genius Network meeting during lunch is I'm going to set up breakout rooms so that people can have lunch with each other if they'd like and just talk to each other during lunch. And it would be like a virtual lunch. Well, all these restaurants, the ones that have a relationship, a lot of independence with individuals, there's so many things that they could do to coordinate those types of relationships. Like a dry cleaner of clothing could offer to do certain cleaning and ask the community to contribute for elderly people or for sick people or people that simply can't do stuff. And so I'd like you to obviously think of hearing what Jay's saying to all the different applications, how to leverage the value of those relationships, if that makes sense. And I know, Dean, you were gonna say something, so go ahead.

We got so many jumping off points here. You missed the point. So I missed an opportunity. But here, jumping in on the restaurant one, I just did a podcast with a guy who owns a restaurant in Georgia and, you know, same thing, people not coming to the restaurant, but they do Cajun style food and we had them cook up home style things like cook up jambalaya and gumbo and all these things that you do in a bucket that somebody could come and get to serve over rice to feed their family. And we did video Facebook video ads in a radius just of their town there in the thing. Hi, this is Brett. I'm here at the restaurant. We're here right now. We're cooking up some really great home cooked homestyle meals for you. We got jambalaya here, we got some gumbo here. We've got all these things that you could serve over rice. And we're going to be putting them in these containers so you can just come and pick them up and take them home. And that was like a big hit for the community because now you've got that asset. But I wanted to talk, going back about the root of what's going on in the restaurant thing because this was happening, the root of it before the coronavirus, before all of that. If we look at what's happened in the last few years of the restaurant world, we've gone from there was. I remember when it first showed up on my radar, there was an article about a venture funded group in New York that had what they were coining as ghost kitchens and ghost restaurants. The article was nine restaurants, one kitchen, no dining room. And this group was running nine different restaurant brands from one kitchen that only existed on grubhub and seamless delivery services. So they had a commissary kitchen in a low rent area. They'd cut out the most expensive and unpredictable part of the restaurant business. And that's become now a thing. And in the three years or so, maybe four years that all this has been happening, it's evolved to the point now where Travis Kalnick, the guy who was the founder of Uber, has 90% of his Uber stock sold and is in to this thing where he's investing in cloud kitchens as a service where now you can go, if you have a restaurant idea, you can go and they serve. They're turning storage facilities with 10 by 10 things into commercial kitchens so that you can all get together. There's this line hallway of all of these commercial kitchens with a dispatch sort of delivery center. So if you want to start a restaurant brand, you can just rent this 10 by 10 commercial kitchen by the day, by the week, toggle it on and off whenever you want to show up on the app. This is really the biggest thing that's happening right now is we're on the cusp of this migration from the mainland into Cloudlandia. And in Cloudlandia, there are no limitations. All of the geographic constraints, the friction, the layers of middlemen that it takes to distribute at retail, all of that is gone. And one by one, you're seeing this cascading flow of business categories that are being toppled and that are coming and doing dtc. Direct to consumer, where you get. The mattress industry has been disrupted by numerous people. Now, where you can buy a mattress that comes in a box and unfolds and lays there for $1,000. Now you've got Casper, you've got Purple, you've got Lisa, you've got all of these ones that are doing the same thing.

There is.

We're going to see unicorn after unicorn after unicorn, meaning billion dollar businesses that happen very quickly on the back of cutting out all the middlemen and going direct to consumer. If you've got a physical good that can fit in a box and is desirable and you know what it is, but you see a picture of it on Instagram or Facebook and you can buy it because you saw some influencer talking about it, you've had the, the reach to them. We're seeing that just happen and happen and happen now. And then you're starting to see the layers of the services that make those kinds of businesses possible. I mean, we've seen in the last year, Kylie Jenner has become a billionaire on the back of, in three years, on the back of partnering with a white label manufacturer who does all of the technical, all of the difficult stuff of making the cosmetics, packaging them, distributing them, doing all of the logistics involved in it. Her mom's business handles all of the administration of it. And she's a billionaire with a team of seven people. And all they do is the creative work they come up with. What do we want to sell? We want to do lip kits. What colors are we going to do? What are we going to name the colors? All of that stuff, hand it off to the distribution or the white label partner to do all of the difficult stuff. And then she just lets her Instagram followers and everybody know that it's available and they go directly and buy it, or they go through Sephora or whatever their distribution channel is, but it breaks the Internet whenever it comes out. So we're starting to see all of that. And often when I tell people that story, they say, well, Kylie Jenner, she's got every advantage possible. But then the greatest gift that we've been given in the last year to counter that is Lil Nas X and Old Town Road. Here's a guy with zero advantages. 20 year old college dropout living in his grandmother's, shipping around between his siblings. Found a free beat online on YouTube by another kid living in his parents house in the Netherlands. And he makes this song, Old Town Road and starts pumping it out to the Internet. It gets picked up on TikTok, goes viral, gets on the Billboard country charts and Billboard immediately takes it off the chart saying, oh wait a minute now, we can't have that on there. And he tweets out, somebody get me Billy Ray Cyrus. Because what's more country than Billy Ray Cyrus? He gets Billy Ray Cyrus involved in the project and it goes to number one in the world. Longest number one song of any song in the history of the Billboard charts. Not a Beatles song, not a Rolling Stone song, not anybody. Nobody's ever had a song on Billboard longer than this song. And that's all happening right now because of our direct access to every single person in Cloudlandia with a one to one connection and zero friction to get to them. So our ability to see those opportunities, to assess what our assets are. Because we may have assets that could collaborate with other people, we may have assets that could be in the right hands and a blessing, an opportunity for somebody else too. So you got to look and see do I have. These fall into three categories, vision capabilities and reach. And we have assets in all three. So if we've got reach, if you've got access to relationships like Jay is talking about, whatever, to whatever level, you know, if you're a restaurant and you've got access to whoever are your existing clients, you're a hairdresser, you're a, whatever business you're in, you do have reach to your relationships. But then you start to think if you could have access or reach to somebody else's audience, I mean at the core level it's affiliate marketing, it's the, that's the seed of it. But what I'm talking about is something even bigger and more in depth than that. The spirit of collaboration is really what it is. I've been so immersed in seeing all the subtleties of what's going on here.

There's some frickin awesome comments. Michael Middleton, who's in UK right now, said. Dean Jay, thank you. I think I might have my 250k idea, which is great.

That's great.

So Jay, let me ask you, what are some strategies and tactics business owners should be thinking about using to bring in cash?

Like right now, there's a lot of different ways. One of them is most people don't think about barter. I've set up lots of things for people. But if you have something you can create or you own that you have margin in, or it's sunk cost and it has value to anybody and you can exchange it for anything that can either be cash converted, used in lieu of what you buy, or there's another word I don't want to get too sophisticated triangulated. You can. We've done, geez, I've done 50, $60 billion million dollars, excuse me of barter. And I could tell you some great barter stories the other.

I've been to your house, you have a lot of art and shit there that you've bartered over the years.

I mean this is. I mean truthfully, I drive a gt. I got a GTS Mercedes I traded a day for. I got a. And I'm saying this just to demonstrate not to be arrogant. I've got A G Wagon 63AMG I traded two days for. Christie has a Porsche we traded for My whole backyard I traded for. But it's understanding value perception. If you have something that you have in oversupply expertise, for example, and that expertise has high perceived value and you can exchange it to somebody that you can demonstrate needs it or needs the not it. Because you're not really selling the expertise, you're selling the result, the saving, the money, the productivity, whatever it's going to be worth. And you can get anything. We used to do with car dealership just as an example, we would create barter profit centers. And I'll go through real quick because it's pretty cool. We would basically look at. And most people don't know it. If you have car dealers there, they know it there. It's a very huge amount of volume that goes through not just volume of cars, but just buying, purchasing, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. We would go through everything they were buying and then we would see what we could trade for instead of purchasing. But when you're trading, you can trade soft for hard on different multiples. And I don't want to get too sophisticated, but we would trade a car for two or three times the value in something else that we would normally pay cash for. So let's say we were going to buy chemicals and we needed cleaning chemicals or lubricating chemicals. We would go to that company and we trade them either automobiles that normally would have, let's call it a 15% margin or less, but we would trade it 2 or 3 to 1. So we would get margins of something like literally 60, 70% to our advantage for something we would normally write a check for. We would also trade for things I could liquidate on the open market for a higher margin. You can trade. I don't want to get too sophisticated. You can JV with people. Again, if you have anything that you sell, you should ask what else do people buy right now? Before, during, after. Instead, if it's still being purchased, then the next level is what else are my buyers buying? And if they're buying it from people they don't know and they're just basically trying to find them anyhow. This goes back to relationships, Joe. You have the ability, with the trust, the credibility that has been very hard won by the years you've served your clients or the value you brought your clients. If it wasn't yours to say, look, this is. And by the way, I have a concept that's called the Aikido school of marketing. And the essence, Anybody that knows what Aikido is, it's the martial arts methodology that uses the power of the enemy against the enemy. If you use the problem to your advantage, you could say, look, it's a little unusual for me to be introducing you to blank, but I know that you're going to be purchasing or using these services or products now, and you probably don't know who to trust. We've built a very strong relationship where hopefully you trust us and our judgment. We've done a very, very comprehensive job and we found what we think are the best providers we've negotiated in behalf of all of our clients. A preferential price, extra terms, guarantees, bonuses. And if you don't know who to trust, we would like to very strongly recommend this. You can choose anybody you want, but we're also ombudsman. You can do things like that all day long. And I hope I'm not getting too rogue on you.

What I like about what you just said. When I was a carpet cleaner back in 1990, one of the ways I came up with a free room of carpet cleaning was I heard one of your I don't know how many thousands of dollars. You were the most expensive seminar guy in the world back in the 90s when I first started listening to your stuff, I remember listening to one of your first set of J. Abraham tapes in 1992 was the first time. And you had some carpet cleaners. And I think back then you were charging like three grand an hour or something and they could not afford you, these two guys that owned the carpet cleaning business. And so they scraped up $2,000 to hire you. And I think you gave them 45 minutes for two grand. And what you told them is you explain lifetime value of a customer and you are great at explaining the whole j abra. You don't know how much you can afford to spend until. Until and unless you know how much a client is actually worth to you. And so you had explained to them, you know, lifetime value of a customer and go out and spend a month giving away carpet cleaning for free. Because what will happen is you will develop reciprocity and then they will refer you and they'll do business with you again. And so what happened is they went to churches and they trade shows and neighborhoods and just offered like an entire houses carpet cleaning. And people would tip them and they'd refer them and things like that. And I was like, huh? So I was like, what if I just gave away a free room of carpet cleaning? And so I started doing that. And then I created a thing called a carpet audit. Because I didn't want to do a free quote. I wanted to do something different. And I developed this system for myself. And then I went to a dry cleaner of clothing was my first joint venture who was already had developed a relationship with people that were bringing their clothing. And I said, can I clean the carpets in your house or your dry cleaner here to show you the services I do, and if you like it, then can we talk about offering services to your clients? Because I wanted him to see my, you know, my services. And so he agreed to let me do his store. And so I cleaned the front entrance. It wasn't a ton of carpet, but it was the front entrance to this dry cleaner. Now what happened is I instilled reciprocity. But then over like the first year, he referred me and I gave him 10% commission of every job that I did. And he referred $25,000 worth of business to me that year. And what my offer was was a free room of carpet cleaning to all his clients. And another thing that I learned through you is that if you offer someone a gift, even if they do not avail themselves of it, you still get the benefit of the reciprocity by getting. And you genuinely do it. You don't want to do it as a gimmick. I mean, if you are offering something to someone, you give it to them, right? And so what ended up happening was all of these people that stopped going to this dry cleaner. I asked after I did a few jobs and people reported back, I was like, can I have your list? And I will call Them I will physically. There was no Internet back then. This is like literally manual marketing, right? And putting postcards and signs on his store. I even got him to put little door hangers over the clothing that said, you know, ask us about our free carpet cleaning. But here's the point as it relates to everybody is I then started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're going to hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter, a pest control company, all of these, you know, asphalt, like everything. You have a relationship with them, you know, different service businesses. And the fact is, like, why is your interior designer writing to you about a carpet cleaner? Why is your carpet cleaning writing to you about a real estate agent? And all of a sudden it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say, who is the joint venture? Or refer that you can develop and establish a relationship with, they can refer that business to you. And right now that opportunity, I think exists in greater levels than ever before because there's this anxiety and there's all these people trying to figure out in many of the comments that people have posted here with these ideas. I mean, I think that's just the way to look at it. And I only bring this up because I was a Deborah carpet cleaner that was just trying to figure out how to learn marketing. Still doing the carpet cleaning myself. And I still manage to build and grow my business doing all this sort of stuff. And now with that level of knowledge and how easy it is with the Internet and the spreading of messages and the need of it is such a great opportunity.

The way I got notoriety was Nightingale. Conant was popular. We had created money making secrets. Mr. X, I met Vic Conant. I sent him the book. He liked it. I said, look, will you send this book if I give you one of them to every one of your. They had about 100 key iconic business and skill set experts. I said, ask them to read it. If they like it, I will buy each one of them an hour of my time. And if they like it and I give them great ideas, ask them if they'll endorse me and if they don't, don't. And I got 80 of them that endorsed me. And I had to invest literally two full months of my time for nothing but the payoff residual that I got out of those relationships. And the aggregate credibility was off the wall.

I have to mention this, Jay, just because you just kind of set it up so here's the Nightingale Conant Piranha marketing program. The seven success multiplying factors to dominate any market you enter. And me and Tim Poulson did this in 2004. And this is the number one selling marketing program of all time at Nightingale Cone. It sold millions of dollars worth of this program back then. And it's, and you know what, you just said a great thing. What it is, is it's their sphere of influence, right? It's these relationships. And one of the things that I think I've learned mostly from you is that the value of a properly or, well leveraged relationship or endorsement is worth way more money and long term value than just selling stuff. And I think that's where people kind of miss it.

You know, here's what people don't think about. I'm a great synthesizer of much brighter people that have mentored and influenced me. But somebody made a point that just blew my mind right when I got really aware of the power of this. And we did it, you know, Icy Hot, we did it with it. Entrepreneur magazine, we did it with it. The gold business, I did it. My brand. We did a quarter billion dollars, Joe of seminars when I was in that business, all on relationships. But somebody made a point, he said, if you were an investor, what would you like to have access to tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of assets at work for nothing? And you would get, he put it in an analogy, sort of what the yield would be. And if you think about it, these relationships. And it's a little different in the online marketing probably, but in the other worlds, these people have spent millions and millions of dollars a year on their business, on their teams, on their technology, on their service people, on their support people, to build goodwill. And you're able to leverage off of all of that either or for a percentage of the reward just on a performance basis or for reciprocating or for giving them your products or services instead. And when you realize that the sheer aggregate asset pool and resource pool and predisposed credibility, pardon me, credibility pool that you're able to access and then you figure out, for example, with your people, they've got their relationships, they've got their clients relationships, they've got their clients clients relationships. And the, and the crescendo effect is just, I mean, it's off the chart, exponential.

Let me ask you this, Jay, and I'm going to kind of combine two questions. So the first one is how should business owners be thinking about their team members and what team members should Business owners be on the lookout to add during a time like this. And secondly, and I'll combine them. The other question was how can salespeople be utilized by business owners more effectively during a down market or a crisis like this? So it's really about how to leverage a lot of the people that are on here. They have teams and some have many employees. I mean, we have some genius network members that have over a thousand employees, a lot of salespeople and some are in a position where they, you know, have to lay them off and others, you know, how do you best leverage them? So do you have any thoughts or ideas on that?

Yeah, but me, I always like to tell anecdotal and empirical based stories. Can I please.

No. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm going to go through dating myself. It sounds a little weird, but if you think about in the days before computers became marginalized, they were sold by very professional teams. And I had a prospective client I almost made a deal with who was in trouble. And they were doing about $50 million selling expensive computers in the days before. And they had about 40 salespeople doing it. And I had made a deal to sell their sales force for hundreds of thousands of dollars of fixed fee and a percentage of the residual to another company right before this company went bankrupt and the trustee fired everybody. And the same thing with moving the accounts. So I think it's looking at how to repurpose a couple things. I've done enormous work with Salesforce is where if you. This is a totally different, but it's very powerful. I have a concept called PEQ optimization Performance enhancement quotient. Basically, if you start with people that have a lot of salespeople doing the same thing, whether they're internal, ex, captive, independent. What you find out is if you go into analyzing granularity, different people excel at different things. I mean, the expectation is everybody's omnipotent, they're not. Some are better at opening accounts, some are better at closing accounts, some are better at selling different products. Some are better at holding margins, some are better at vertical type industries. When you find the people that are better, sort of the Deming process of process improvement, you want to find out what they do better, how much better and teach those elements and you can codify them to everybody. But if they're five or six times better, you want to make them a specialist. So that's the first thing. If your people are still performing, you want to do because you can make your entire sales force and the sales process 10, 15, 20% better almost overnight doing that. If the people that are selling can't sell right now what you sell, I would look at what I said, what's the influence they normally have? What else do they buy? How can you. I mean, I always made a lot of money for people by finding quality people that couldn't market or sell, but had the capacity to scale up and getting total control of their distribution and taking it to markets they couldn't penetrate, or to distribution mechanisms, access vehicles that they couldn't. So that's another, the third. I hope I'm not being too abstract. I'm loving this. And I'll get. I mean, you got me turned on now. This is fun. But if you look at all these salespeople out there now, you can divide and conquer. You can look at people that have specific connections to specific either industries or influencers and figure all kinds of wonderful ways to use them if they're not working. You can go to companies that have those people. And like my son has, he works for a company that sells an injectable like Botox. They're keeping their salespeople on, but they can't sell anything right now because no one's buying. But they have relationships with all these dermatologists and all these entrepreneurial doctors that want to make more money. If I were doing what you said, I would go to all the. I would either go to the company first, if they still have a sales force, introduce to them something else that their salespeople could pre sell to these doctors. A lead generating system, an online marketing system, referral generation. We have 225 ways to generate referrals, all those things. And it would monetize now and residually for that company or that company could take that over.

So Patrick wrote COVID 19 has proven that no matter how remote, no matter what race and socioeconomic status, we are all irrepressibly connected. If this virus can reach anywhere, even when we are trying to physically isolate, then so can hope be spread directly and irrepressibly. I mean, that's really great.

Yeah, that is good. And I saw him. It was sad. I saw Patrick right before everything stopped. He came to my office with his team. And I know him a couple different ways. I know him with Paul Pilzer, a friend of both of ours. And yeah, he's a really impressive guy.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Super. Jake, can I just say that you're.

Just a quick comment on that. That interview was brilliant and it's gonna. The world is gonna see it at some point for sure.

No, that was very gracious, I think. I mean it was nice that they came and interviewed me for a project, but. Yeah, but he's a really cool guy, very bright and very great quality. I think that what you have attracted. Joe and I wanna affirm something and I'm sure all your members know it. Besides being one of the real good guys, you have attracted some of the most qualitative and collaborative minded people. I've done a couple of of statements for you, but I want to just be very public. I am so impressed with. For no ulterior motive than just my appreciation of ethos and contribution and value creation that you've created an environment where people really do go out of their way and share openly and freely the attributes, the knowledge, the methodologies. And I think it's really wonderful and I'm very proud of it and I'm very pleased and honored to be able to contribute a little bit.

I so appreciate it. Thank you. And yeah, that's what we try to do. You know, the whole life gives to the giver and takes from the taker sort of thing. So that's.

Yeah, thank you.

And Jenny, you're the one that told us it's our moral obligation to do it. So it goes around. So it's okay.

I mean, it is. I was very blessed and Joe knows this everybody and it's something that I would urge everyone to really reflect on. We created something years ago, but it was not original. I borrowed it actually from a. I derivatized it from films publishing, believe it or not, Brian. And then I expanded it. But it's called the strategy of preeminence. And it's an ideology, it's a strategic philosophy that you instill to be seen in the world of your audience as the only viable choice, the most trusted advisor for life. But it has with it corresponding responsibilities in order to achieve that outcome. And it's pretty cool, but it is. You have the moral responsibility if you know that your company, your product or service is going to make a bigger difference in the life, the outcome. Protect, enhance, enrich, whatever it's going to do. You can't let the prospective person not use you. You can't let them choose an alternative that's not going to be as effective. You can't let them buy less than they should and less quantity, quality or frequency. Not because you're going to be the loser, but because they are. It's a pretty cool concept.

Yeah. Jeff, by the way. Who? You know, Jeff Madoff. Jay, he's in, you know, New York and earlier today, you know, I mean, it's. That's in one of the hardest, of course, most difficult cities right now in America.

Hi, Jeff.

Hey, Jay.

I love the glasses.

Thank you. Thank you. So lots of people are dealing with lots of fear right now. It's a scary time. A lot of people are having to figure out what to do with their business. As Joe referenced, what to do with the people that work for them. You said, and I agree, that adversity also breeds opportunity.

Yes.

Creativity often comes from crisis.

Yes.

So one of the things we're seeing in New York, for instance, is that grocery stores are doing more business than ever. The problem they have, and this goes to, actually, Dean Jackson's point, is implementation, because they don't have enough delivery people. So there's a surge in business, but they don't have the delivery people to deliver enough, so they can't keep up with the demand. So there are businesses like here. Zoo is doing an amazing business now. Wasn't doing an amazing business two months ago. So there are opportunities that come up, but there's also fear that comes up with a lot of people. And I'm going to quote somebody now that you all, everybody listening might know of. And the quote is, what I learned is that which you fear and don't face controls you. That which you fear and take steps to face, you can control or at least get better at dealing with.

I like it.

That's Joe Polish's quote. It's actually out of my book that's coming out. But the point is, and what I wanted to ask you, Jay, is amidst the philosophy and the optimism, there is a real fear out there, and people are having to confront that fear. And what I'm wondering is, how do you overcome the fear and move forward at a time that is unlike anything any of us have ever experienced before?

The first is, I'm a great believer in, you know, if you look at physics, basically you expand or you contract, you grow or you die. You don't stay static. You either become a multiplier or diminisher in all aspects of life. I think if we recognize that we can't control what has happened, but we can control our ability to find opportunities in it, that's just a declaratory statement. And then with that, we can have certainty within uncertainty, if that doesn't sound contradictory. I mean, I can promise you this. What I love, I was very ingrained early in my career in Socratic thinking. And the reason was that if you ask enough questions, if you turn The Rubik's Cube. Enough ways, if you look at it from enough CAT scan, sort of perspective, vantage points, honest to goodness, you will always find pay dirt anywhere, even in adversity. I was trained, Jeff, also in optimization, highest and best use theory, getting a maximum result from time, effort, opportunity, access, people, capital, resources. But the problem with optimization and the problem with answering your question for most people, and the advantage that I've gotten quite accidentally is you can't optimize with a limited context of what's possible. The more you travel outside of a given reference frame, the more options, alternatives you have, the more power you possess. And it's really about wielding what I'll call ethical integral power. But you can't really know your power until you know the possibilities. And I don't know if that's too abstract for you.

Listen, I wish that I had the intelligence to understand what you guys have been talking about for the last 45 minutes. So it's an abstraction on an abstraction.

Try to be a little bit more concrete.

Yeah, actually I would love you to be a little more concrete because I'd like to take this down to the people. And I'm sure there are many who are on this that are concerned about the struggle they're facing and how to bridge from now to after this.

Okay, so whatever business you are in, you got to stop and ask, is that business going to probably endure or stall or stop either now or when it goes forward because you got it's fork in the road? I believe so. It either is or it isn't. Will you accept that?

Yes.

If it is, then how do I optimize ethically? Well, first thing is you look at the weaker players and you see if you can consolidate. Because if you've got a structure that's solid and you've got infrastructure that can absorb a lot, you can grow by consolidating and you can be very beneficial by giving revenue to somebody who's not going to be able to thrive anyhow. Second is you see what other complementary products or services that are logical and then you go to the next level. Whatever else is within the realm of credulity for you to offer to the buying influence. So you start in there, then you look at how many ways you can repurpose resources for other people. Whether it's infrastructure, whether it's salespeople, whether it's distribution, whether it's process, whether it's methodology, if that makes sense, start there. And then if you cannot, you look at skills, you look at what you've got both in again infrastructure, skillset and look at other things that you can instantly or rapidly low cost, low risk, high probability. Apply those same things too in almost any other area. Because if you think about it, I'm a marketer, you're a marketer. Joe is a marketer. I've done over a thousand industries, you know, some more successful than others. But it is strategy, marketing, it's being preemptive, being preeminent, being able to understand the mind and the madness of a typical audience. But it's not really, it doesn't really matter, does it? If you look at people who pivoted, a lot of the pivots go from one totally different. I mean I can't remember one of the famous companies started off in something really stupidly different. I think you have to be open minded to explore and examine your options, your alternatives, your possibilities. And then you look, I mean I mentally for clients and myself created a matrix or a template of different things. Viability, probability, resource allocation, expedience, yield. You have to be able to sort of integrate a bunch of those at the same time. And I don't know if that's still too abstract for you.

It's not. It's interesting. And I think, you know, one of the. Patrick just made a chat comment that was fascinating about entrepreneurship and about artistry and so on. And so when I was reading that, listening to what you were saying then thinking about you, Joe, because your business really built on personal crisis and that's how you eventually became as successful as you are because you went through crisis. And I think that crisis can be a tremendous fuel if it doesn't freak you out and you can't get out of bed in the morning. And you're talking what you do when you do get out of bed in the morning. Here's how you look at these things and here's what to do. So I think we're at a very unique time. That fork in the road you're talking about and I think that the creativity and crisis in dealing with that adversity and as again you said Jay, adversity brings about opportunity. All of these together are very combustible and I think very potent mix to do new things and create new opportunities.

I love the visual and igniting. One other thing that I would commend everybody and I've told this to people all my life. So I'm an accidental industry tourist. I accidentally became what looked terrible in the beginning, a job transient. And then it became a great attribute because I was able to understand how to combine elements from all kinds of different industries that people didn't know. And I was the one eyed man in the land of the blind. I think it's essential for people now to travel outside of whatever industry they're in and whatever methodology of selling, marketing, anything and force themselves to examine, experience all kinds of things outside. I used to have people. We have a program which I'll gladly give you also Joe called Do things Differently. It's just how to think about things totally different than everybody else. But I used to have people on weekends when they could go to their local convention hotel and walk through and just sit in. If the people would let them on five or six seminars and conventions or conferences going on in totally different arenas and try to see what they could learn. When we did seminars, I would basically, back when bookstores existed, we would get a thousand different out of print but timeless books and magazines on topics that were either business or skills or hobbies. And we would find people that would acknowledge what they loved, like mechanical things or artistry things. And we would give them the opposite, send them to their room to read two chapters or two articles and make them come back and present to their group distinctions they got they'd never thought about that had direct implication and application to their business. And I think breakthroughs, if you look at them historically do not come from within an industry. They come from without. Rogaine was from basically, I think pimples. Viagra was a heart. Fiber optics was aerospace, not communication. I remember all the things. FedEx basically mirrored this hub and spoke system that the Federal Reserve bank cleared. I think more than ever you gotta get your creativity expanded way beyond the normalcy of where you normally hunt.

And by the way, let me say this, Jay, because I want to see if I can find this comment from Pedro, who's the challenge expert.

I'd like to meet him. I hear he's really brilliant.

He's on here right now and I'm going to connect you guys. If you're fine, I'll send you both a text. He wrote, the strategy of preeminence is one of my main guiding philosophies that has changed my life forever.

Oh, that's so great.

Let me read this. Patrick Gentempo. The conversation stimulated this thought. Otters, I think, are the most important people in the world right now. I'm not just talking about people who draw, paint or sculpt. I'm referring to creative geniuses. No matter the vocation, those who see things differently and apply creativity to Their actions and artists can simply lift our spirits or perhaps change the world profoundly. That's what entrepreneurs do. And then Patrick then followed up to me. Jay is not a marketer. He is an artist who does marketing. Just like Hendrix was not a guitarist. He was an artist who played guitar.

That's nice. Thank you.

So, Jay, any famous last words that you can do in under a minute?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the most important thing in the world is that we probably all feel very challenged, but I don't think we realize the capacity of identification and ethically exploiting opportunities that will never be as abundant. Right now, it really requires you to have great flexibility. But I'll tell one last point. Years and years ago, everybody knows I was afraid to fly and wouldn't go anywhere. It was hilarious. Then one day I realized I could die sitting around some. Might as well die seeing the world. And I started flying. And I was sitting one time on one of the very first 747 SPS, the long ones in Australia, leaving. We were flying and I looked out the window and I was scared shitless that the damn wings were, you know, they were. They were whatever the word is, something like 20ft. And I happened to be sitting next to a deadhead pilot and I was commenting, I was scared. And he said, you don't understand. If you didn't have that flexibility the first time you hit turbulence, it would break off and fall to earth. So we need flexibility in our lives more so today. And that flexibility is manifest in expanded exploration of opportunities, reflection on what business we can really be in, how many better, different, expanded ways we can serve our clients, how many ways we can repurpose our assets, our access, how much more possibility exists and how we can be value creators in terms of what our markets define as value, not us. As the world changes. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. And I really love the fact that you've allowed me to contribute. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like to access the show, notes, resources, or the exercise to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 372.

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