Business Wealth Without Risk: Preeminence Strategy
2 Feb 2026 · 16 min
Roland Frazier and Jay Abraham discuss preeminence: positioning your business as the incomparable, most trusted choice rather than just the best. They use Starbucks, Netflix, and Ritz-Carlton as examples of companies that decommoditized through customer empathy and mission-driven culture.
Questions this episode answers
Authors: Roland Frazier and Jay Abraham; Introduction by Tony Robbins; Foreword by Daymond John; Preface by Gino Wickman.
16 weeks (or less).
Text "I'm in" to 334-458-9034.
Chapters
Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier here. And I'm really excited. Jay Abraham and I wrote a book. Tony Robbins wrote the introduction. Also Daymond John wrote the foreword. Gino Wickman from EOS wrote the preface.
It is a very cool book.
And to launch it, Jay and I.
Have created a series of video interviews.
With him and me talking about different chapters. So we wanted to share this with you on social and on our podcast so that you can. You were able to participate and kind of see what was going on behind the scenes. So these are videos and clips where I'm talking with Jay about introducing each chapter or each section of the book.
So you'll hear us talk about the book.
But we still wanted to share them here because I think there's some good insights, some good stories, and some good takeaways for you. So enjoy and understand that anytime I'm talking about a section of the book or the book, it's because these are the videos that go on the front of each video training related to the book. We just wanted to share the takeaways and kind of the conversational back and forth with Jay and me with you guys. I hope you enjoy it. And now it's going to play.
All right, so now it comes down to probably the thing that I remember hearing about you most when I was just kind of getting familiar with all of your body of work is, and that is your strategy of preeminence. And I want to talk about a couple of things depending on if you're coming into this as just a training on preeminence, then definitely dig in. And if you are coming in as a result of our book, then you will have probably already gone through in part two of the book where we talk, and Jay in particular talks about how to think bigger in the first chapter of that, how to think better with mental models in the second chapter, how to use leverage, optimize and move levers and fulcrums around in the third, then drivers of exponential growth in the fourth, and then relational capital.
Why, Jay?
Why preeminence after all of that?
I think once you realize all the tools, then we want to shock your system and say, but you want to elevate your game to an infinitely more stratospheric level. Then you don't want to be seen in any way, shape or form as a commodity. You want to be seen as the only viable choice, the most trusted advisor or source or resource anybody could choose for life. And you want to be able to understand all the psychological ways to do it, how to Connect at a deeper level with your audience, how to have their best interests at heart, how to help them see that you are the only one that cares, that tries to serve them, that understands them. And, and it's a really wonderful premise. It is probably the most powerful strategic philosophy or philosophical strategy anybody in business will ever learn. It becomes the driving force and source of your culture, your advertising, your belief system. It defines what you stand for, what you, why you stand for it, who you stand for. And if you, you sort of, if you. There's a word I want to use. If you basically retrofit it on a business that is underperforming, it'll transform it. It'll it mean. Of all the successes I have engineered and the ones that you think the most of, almost everyone embraced a variation. And by the way, it doesn't matter whether you're selling consumer products business to business, high end, low end, it gives you powerful advantage. You could be selling ice cream from a little cart in the middle of the park. And if you have the best tasting ice cream, if you have the best cones, if you basically take the time to smile at everybody, if you understand that you're helping somebody who's an adult, maybe from the office, come over for 10, 15 minutes and get a reprieve from their enormous stress of day to day and go back to a moment in time when they were an innocent little child and you celebrate that for them. I mean, it's a way of really being connected at a level that none of your competitors can. And this is, if you think about all the things you gave them on how to get it, I gave them up to there on how to blow it up. Now it's, it's putting the equivalent of a bi turbo supercharged blower on the engine and then running nitro in it. And if you don't know what that means, if you're a layperson, race cars and drag cars and cars that are going massive speed and massive championships and massive record setting achievements, burn nitro. It's a, it's a, it's a purest fuel that it gives far more power. And it's the ultimate power force and source that you couple on after you do these other things.
Okay, so let's be clear on what preeminence is, because I don't think it's just being the best. It's not maybe just being perceived as the best, but what would a good definition be for everybody?
A working definition, Being preeminent is being seen in an incomparable way above and beyond everyone else for what your business means to that audience that you're serving. And it's a little bit variable because it depends on what you are. You know, I don't have it in front of me, but I have a whole thesis that I do on all the companies you'd know who are preeminence versus the ones that aren't and everything. But, you know, it's, it's, it's denominated by how you see your connection to them. It's how they see their connection to you. It's how you make them feel a part. It's the, it's the community, it's the, it's the empathy you show them. You know, for some, for Uber, it's having a frictionless transaction. For Netflix, it's being able to know all this really cool data and serving it up to you. For Ritz Carlton, it's that they'll do anything to serve their clients. For, you know, for some of the airlines that, I mean, you think about, and I'm not demeaning them, but a United or American, they're not very distinct, but there's certain ones that they, the flight attendants are so wonderful. The whole experience is wonderful. I'm going to New York. I fly mint because I love mint because they make you feel special. It's fun. I used to fly early in the game when you could go to London, I would fly Virgin because it was fun.
They had a little bar on board.
And you go into the lounge and they had swings. The kids would stay on and they had fun. And it's understanding that my client, I have the most successful Acura and Honda dealer in North America. And they got into pickup and delivery of service right before COVID And they've been obsessed with frictionless transaction. They created at great expense an app like Uber. You know exactly the status of your car. You don't have to call and be put on hold. My wife had our Mercedes in the shop and she was put on hold and nobody called her back. And she was pulling her hair out because she was supposed to get it two days ago, but they didn't even have the part in and the service person didn't call her back. And you're talking about a Mercedes. We're spending $5,000 fixing it. But my, my client had, you know, exactly the status, where it is, what the status is, when they're going to deliver, what it cost, everything. And it's, it's being seen totally incomparable to anybody else. That's sort of the, the, the essence and, and everybody's on a mission and a crusade. Your whole team feels part of, of that. They're, they're part of a, of a, of a mission and they fall in love. You fall in love not with your business or your product, your service. You fall in love with the people you serve and you understand the impact your product, service company people make in the lives of the people when they get your product or service and they're using. It's not a static, superficial, it's a very powerful. And it really animates your spirit. It's liberating, it's intoxicating. If you retrofit a mundane commodity type business that is successful but grossly under performing and you re instill it and you basically re. Fuse it, re infuse it with a strategy, preeminence, it just blows up everything that happens.
And, and in a world of copycats where a lot of people are offering the same or similar things. What I mean, and I know it's kind of interesting. I'll get to my point here. But let me wander a bit before I do. It's, it's interesting that there were coffee shops everywhere and yet Starbucks was able to exist. And, and that you see 50 cents a cup.
Yeah.
And you see this over and over and over where things that have become commoditized are decommoditized and branded like that. What, what can the average person do who feels that they're adrift in a sea of equal or better competitors do to become preeminent?
Well, we give, I mean I give a whole list of factors, denominators, mind shifts and applications. But you can start just thinking in your life, who do you deal with that you would never ever choose anyone else and you don't care if they're more expensive because. And then ask what is it about that experience and how can you borrow elements And I just distill it all for you and tell you the answer. But if you want to just know right this moment, that's, you know, it's, it's, there's no comparison. You know that there's, that the legal, you're, you're, you have a legal background. No contest. There's no contest. There's nobody that can even touch you when you're preeminent because you're operating in this elevated world that none of your competitors even understands. And it's, everyone is on a mission, so they're all working together and everybody feels they're a part of this outcome. To Protect, enhance, enrich the people you're serving. And it's a really different way. And the companies that do it, I learned it from a company that was preeminent in the publishing world, and they were three times more successful in terms of revenue, but they were eight times more profitable than their average competitor. And they sold for $650 million 20 years ago when that was a lot of money, because they were preeminent. Their closest competitors sold for a multiple that was less than half of that. But these people they created, and I studied it, I took what they had done. They had a guy that. I learned this from a guy that ran a huge division of Boston Consulting. He used all these methodologies that they had used to propel some very huge clients to great stature and blow up the stock price. And they translated it to smaller businesses. And then he took a full time job with a huge equity kicker running this business. And it wasn't that profound until he put these elements into it. I traded them to give you the value here. I traded them $500,000 of my consulting for the privilege to interview him for a day and all of the team for a week to figure out how it really was understood, how it applied, how they implemented it, how they really manifest and expressed. And then I distilled it down to this simple understanding.
I love that. I think some of the other good examples we've got is you have Sarah Blakely, who innovated the basically pantyhose, which had been around forever, and I didn't even know until we talked to her that those were all designed by men. And so that like, she, she had the crazy innovation of what if we made different sizes available instead of one size fits everybody and, and made them more practical. And then that otherwise commoditized thing became something that I think is clearly preeminent in the market. And if you think about Uber, you talked about the experience with your, you know, with, with your wife in the car with Mercedes, you know, do you remember what a pain in the butt it used to be to get a cab? It's like, you can't.
Like, how do you.
You got to get somebody to call one or hope that you can find one. And you know, you're in a busy street in New York or someplace like that and good luck, you got your hand out for 30 minutes trying to flag something down.
But they made it so much simpler.
And so I think, is it, is it really primarily about customer experience, Jay, or is it some combination of that and branding beyond customer experience?
I Think it's beyond that. I think it's partially that, but it's about having people feel that you feel the way they are and you understand what they're trying to get closer to or away from and that you're there to make that fully attainable and to do it. It's actually, it's probably in the simplest term, it's being able to have people see that you have their best far ahead of your own, and that you are arguably, if not the only one. The level you have, the awareness and the commitment and the, and the, and the capability that you are, that you are providing is so incomparable to anyone else. And again, it works whether you're the high end, the low end business to business, whether you're local, whether you're sophisticated, whether you're international. I've done it for every kind of business imaginable. And people have reported that. That alone will give you an example. I'm going to New York tomorrow. I'm going to work with a company that went from a commodity doing 35 million to the number one provider of ducks like ducks to over 50% of every Asian restaurant in the United States and 80% of every of every Michelin restaurant. They went from 35 to 250 million in a relatively short order. And the owner credits four or five of my methodologies preeminence, the three ways to grow a business, the power, Parthenon and variability in testing and optimization. And we teach that and a lot more in that section alone.
Yeah, that's awesome. So it doesn't necessarily have to be an expensive thing that you're doing here, like to become preeminent. It just really requires focusing on these things that you talk about in that part. Right?
That is correct. Touche.
Yeah, I love that. Okay, well, thank you. I appreciate the time. And guys, dive in to preeminence and let us hear how this works for you.
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