Jay Abrahams Biggest Takeaways From 2020.

There'll never be as wide a window open of companies, influencers, organizations of all kinds, media platforms, bloggers, podcasters who are open and receptive to collaboration, joint venture. You just have to be astute enough to know how to identify, position it and then structure it. And most importantly, you shouldn't waste the opportunity. You should have something with high viability because if you set it up for yourself once you do that, then you can turn that into a distribution channel. You can put all kinds of other people's stuff down. And now you have an asset play that could be very long lived.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for tuning in. As we ramp up this holiday week, we hope you and yours are staying safe, healthy and feeling good about 2021. And with that in mind, today's show is well worth a listen. We've already had the pleasure of having Grant Cardone and Daymond John share their biggest takeaways from this extra challenging year. So check out those shows if you haven't already. Now it's Jay Abraham's turn to enlighten us with what he's learned in 2020 and what he will be taking from this year into 2021. So take a listen, share the show with your business minded friends and be sure to hit subscribe.

All right, so we have the one and only Jay Abraham here with us today. Jay, are you there he is. I love it. In the wine room. Are you in the wine room? That is so cool.

Yeah. You've never seen the wine room?

I have not, no. And now I'm feeling like I need to do that. So things that you have learned in 2020 during this crazy time that you're going to take into next year and that can help the folks here share with us a little bit about what your experience has been. Because I know when we first talked you lost millions of dollars of revenue because you couldn't travel, right?

I lost many millions.

It was heartbreaking for about a day. And then you realize nobody cares, so.

You might as well shift.

I don't like the word pivot because I think it's been beat up, but I think you have to find a.

New way of thinking, that's all.

Yeah. So what new ways of thinking have you found and what methodologies for those new ways have you found and implemented so far that you're going to share with us today?

Well, I'm going to answer the question, but I'd like to share Something more universal that I think is a powerful source that will drive everybody. So, I mean, in all honesty, my kind of a business has always flourished in adversity. I got, you know, I've been through six, seven downturns, nothing as profound as this. And I have been trained to see opportunity in adversity. And so I've been able to very, very methodically go to people, calm them down, show them two or three things. One, it doesn't really matter if the market's flat or even dropping. As long as there's a market, there's opportunity. Because most people are getting a fraction of the yield in a whole litany of ways. They're getting a fraction of the yield in the responses.

They're getting a fraction of the conversion.

A fraction of the monetization fraction of the yield of the current market. And if they can understand how to reset all of those fractional performances up and then they can elevate their stature, no matter whether it's high end, low end, whatever their positioning is, then they, you can't see it, but then they can get the majority of new flow. And if you do the math, it's off the chart. So it doesn't matter if the market's that. It doesn't even matter if the market's that. And it doesn't matter if they're resource impaired, which is what I've been trained to do. You can always get anything you want.

As long as you figure out who's.

Got it and how to make it worth their while. So we encourage people to think much.

High performance, if that makes sense.

And I'm not, as you know, a digital master, but I teach people how to make all of the performance dynamics.

Produce far more for no more effort.

It's really a powerful understanding in this.

Kind of a market.

Okay, so what do we do?

So the first thing you do is you look at performance elements that no one else does.

Everyone.

I mean, you got, if you do a lot online, you got your optimization and you got all this. But the last mile is oftentimes it's manual. Have you noticed that there's all kinds of variation in that? First of all, I stand for what I call the Power Partheniel.

I've got the three ways to grow.

A business, the advanced three ways. But the Power Parthenon is something most people really don't do. They default to one primary source and they don't realize there's all these other ways to penetrate a market. There's all these other ways to collaborate with people. That have the market. There's all these people that have access to the market before, during, after. Normally they would buy yours, or instead there's all these markets that you don't think of that are not defined as the market you would normally target, but they're subsets of any market. And when you start looking at that, it opens up all kinds of business. I don't know if that's too abstract for you.

No, it isn't. And what occurred to me is a couple of things that you and I have talked about during this time. So thing one is most people never think to use mass media like radio, satellite radio, print and television. You during this time identified a strategy because you said, let me look at the market and towards what you said look at performance elements that no one else does. This is like a whole media element. Would you talk a little bit about the strategy that you had, what you did with the radio stations and, and how that's been going? Because that's something that I think everybody here could think about doing locally or nationally.

Yeah, and most of the stuff I do is high end for myself. But just to give it in context, in the last year we helped a client go from 40 million to 140 million plus just by showing them that they could access their market there. You probably heard them, if you're in any car and listen to Sirius, they do timeshare contract cancellation and, and all we did was show them that if they bought media at full rate they would lose their ass. But if they bought it from people that had access to remnants standby, they could buy it for 85% off. And at 85% off, all of a sudden something that loses its ass is very profitable. And then when they did that, we were able to get them the same thing on cable Networks at about 85% off. And all of a sudden they're the biggest advertiser in the sector and they're making the guy's making $40 million a year just because of that distinction. I had 500 radio stations for the bulk of COVID that were totally willing to do anything. Their sales were down. Do you understand? Radio, newspapers, same thing. Online is much better. Or anything that is electronic because the cost is almost nominal. But when the day is over, the issue is done, the hour expires, they can't save the advertising opportunity, it's gone forever. So it's just like the analogy of a hotel. And it used to be the same with things like cruises and hotels are the same thing, but they need to monetize it. I had 500 radio stations and I could have had 5,000 that were not doing well. They had unsold advertising that was just dissipating. And they were willing to do rev share, lead share. They were willing to let me package events they could do virtually. They were willing to let me go into their market and engineer rev shares with providers. Home improvement. I mean, there's opportunity galore. The first thing you have to do is ask who has my market, how many ways can I reach the market, how can I move fixed cost to variable at least until I have some quantification. And that opens up in my life. That's been the mother load of opportunity and Roland, because I know it's tight and I was going to tell a bunch of cool JV type stories, but if you want to take me in a different direction, I'm all for that. You guide me and I'll follow judiciously.

I want to do these two things in particular because they were really smart that you did. Not that everything isn't really smart. These were smart and applicable to this time. How about that? So the strategy with the media reaching out to the radio stations, you did that through direct mail? Traditional direct mail, is that correct?

Yes, two ways I found. I happen to have known him because I served him for a couple years, but the guy that owns the definitive journal for radio management and I've helped him and I do a lot of things for people after they're done being clients because I know there's always reciprocity. And he lent full endorsement to me in a couple of E blasts and then we sent letters concurrently.

Yeah, so you did. It was kind of a two step. You had a center of influence you aligned with and then used that connection to leverage. So that was thing one that I thought was really, really great. And the other was that you said if you want to access huge networks of connected sales forces, there's a lot of people right now who have giant networks who are no longer working selling. Would you talk about that? Because I thought that was brilliant.

You know this about me. I'm a mad scientist who creates stuff.

And then forgets what I've created.

I identified five windows of COVID opportunity that were quite profound. And I haven't talked about this for a while. So let me access it. Number one.

Love it, number one.

And it's still available. And if it goes the other way, it'll be more available than you can imagine. There'll never be an environment you guys and girls are all oriented towards. Affiliate programs. But there's a much bigger world of collaboration, endorsement, joint venture, packaging, co branding, just all kinds of stuff you don't even understand that dwarfs honestly where affiliate is. If you understand it, there'll never be as wide a window open of companies, influencers, organizations for not for profits of all kinds. Media platforms, bloggers, podcasters who are open and receptive to collaboration, joint venture, performance based opportunities. You just have to be astute enough to know how to identify, position it and then structure it. And most importantly, you shouldn't waste the opportunity. You should have something with high viability because if you set it up for yourself, once you do that, then you can turn that into a distribution channel, you can put all kinds of other people's stuff down and now you have an asset play that could be very long lived. That's the first thing. The second is an extension of that. There are many, many, many companies who are on the ropes. They are just getting by or they're not getting by and they're just depleting capital. If you can identify who they are, and this goes to Roland's EPIC program very, very strongly, you can acquire them for no money down and pay out of the proceeds. The risk is almost nothing. If you either have an existing business that can consolidate in, you can get rid of a lot of the expenses that are duplicated. Number two, if you don't have a business like that, you can consolidate bunch of them. If you don't have a business like that, you can look at companies that sell things before, during, after instead of what you sell. And it can monetize either as a lead generator, an LTV extension, a what I call sunk cost monetization. The third is really cool. This is what Roland was talking about. So many people have been temporarily put out of work and they tend to polarize. The largest number is going to be at the lower end of skillset and I have great empathy for them, but it's not relevant for this discussion. A surprisingly large number is at the top part. This is really interesting. These are people who before they lost their job were interfacing with decision makers in different spectrums of the business continuum that you would probably give your left. You know what to have access to. They might be dealing with CEOs, with CTOs, with CMOs, with heads of transportation. Depends on what you're selling. Now these people are out of work, used to making two $300,000 a year, making $1,000 or less a week, struggling, starving, stressed out of their gourd. You can find them on LinkedIn and I'm sure Roland would give you other sources. You can go them and if they don't have a non compete and even if they have a non compete in many states it's not even enforceable. But they have these relationships that are sunk cost. You can go to them and you can show them if you can win their trust for you, your company, your product, people that they introduce you instantly to. Maybe 20, 30 people you would in a lifetime never get access to at that level of credibility and you give them some kind of a variable for closed deals, you can go crazy. The next level is a derivative of that. There's tons of salespeople who have been either put out of work or are quite compromised because either the company consolidated or the product they were selling and the way they were selling it was not as viable during COVID They're sitting around and they could do any of the following. They can do all the three things, set up and find them for you. I just talked about they can go out and find you deals, you can deploy them for other people and take a piece. I mean it's crazy. And then the last thing. Well, there's many things, but the last window of opportunity that I thought was really cool is what I call option trading. But it's not option trading in the context Roland that an investor would think about. It's much more intangible, much more lucrative and fascinating. It's getting control of intangible assets or access. And I'll give you a couple of simple examples from past recessions. One of my friends moved to California about 20 years ago in a recession and he had no business at all. But he was very ingenious and he started looking around and he figured out that the Rose bowl, the actual Rose bowl stadium and facilities that are owned by the county was only being used a very few amount of of days on the weekends for UCLA football games, the Rose bowl and some concerts at night. The rest of the time it was totally empty. It had massive exhibit capacity, massive parking capacity. He went to the county, he negotiated a deal to turn it into flea markets on all the days and times. It wasn't being used on the weekends and holidays. And he gave them a guaranteed percentage of revenue and he built into it a renewal and he had a little slight addition that he could partner with somebody. He didn't know one iota about the flea markets. But as soon as he had the deal tied up, he found the number one flea market management company in the country. He got about a Half a million dollar advance against his percentage and he ended up making millions and millions just for flipping it. There are, if you think about it, if you look at whatever you do and a lot of your competing viciously with one another, but if you find other companies doing something like that or similar, most of them, if they're successful, they've created methodology, they've created processes, they've created systems, techniques that are higher performing than the norm, which gives them advantage. If you can figure out who they are, you can acquire the use of that for either a fee or percentage or you know, a percentage of the savings or the efficiency. And if it's really cool, you can flip it to lots of other people. We've had five or six clients. We've been able to take something they did internally that was higher performing either on revenue or conversion or cost saving or cash flow management or anything and resold it to thousands of other people. And I can go on and on, but is that what you were talking about?

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's awesome. Thank you. Those five things I think are very, very helpful. And the other thing, Jay, you made a list of things that you were going to share. Can we just lightning round through those things and share some of your.

I thought I would share. I mean I have about 100 stories that I've done for myself or clients or partners have done that generated very literally billions of dollars. And they're all predicated on thinking differently. And I had, I was going to go through a litany but I'll come up with just a few real quick because of the time allocation. Probably if I you all, and I don't mean you rolling but many of the people on are digital type marketers and they're very used to affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing is good but you can take the concept of accessing somebody's affinity, existing trust and access to such a higher strata of sublime. And I thought I would tell you how we used to do it pre in a couple of different scenarios just to get your mind stimulated. And again I had 100 different stories to tell. But I'll tell those two because they have relevancy if that makes sense. So probably the first thing is before I did a quarter billion dollars of seminars myself when I was younger in two years and spent maybe 200 grand fixed to do it because of a process that I will tell you secondly but I'll tell you first how we did a half a billion dollars a year for a company with no fixed investment. It was all variable. I was in the gold business, right when gold was re legalized, everyone else was running ads in financial publications. I realized that the financial newsletters were, were the real source. I went to all of them and I did the following. I did not just say hey, will you endorse us? I said, well, can we become your recommended provider? And as such will you do the following? Number one, every time you get a new subscriber, let us send just like you'll send a welcome packet. Let us send to you or direct to them a welcome packet that gives them the overview, understanding and the perspective of hard asset investing gold silver coins. Second, let us underwrite four times a year a special edition newsletter that you can send out all about hard assets. It'll be perspective and interviews of prominent people. We will pay the cost. Number three, let us, let us underwrite regional programs where we will bring an iconic person. Our head will, our president will talk, you will talk. You can have all the, you can have all the front end profit. Number four, give us joint tenancy of the names of everyone comes in and we gave them a share. Number five, when your marketing piece stops working. In most newsletters back then, their model was that had to break even. And break even was one of two criteria roll and it was either breaking even with fulfillment of the newsletter. Breaking in without fulfillment was only about six or eight dollars a year. If it's below that, we would take over the marketing. I would get fix the headline, the proposition, the risk reversal, the bonus, the call to action. We would underwrite it for half of the upside if we made a profit joint tenancy because those leads were valuable to us. Number six, if it stopped working there, most newsletter offers were front end loaded with bonuses. We would take the offer then modify it to a gold lead offer with that bonus because I could reduce our negative cash flow lead generation cost by about 80%. So I'm saying you can take the concept of affiliate marketing to such a. Oh, by the way, and I never ever had the same message to any list because there was so much overlap. I would take the time to create separate communications that uniquely articulated the voice and the market so that people, if they were on seven different lists, instead of getting the same thing and thinking it was basically, you know, predictable, would say, geez, each one of the people that I respect is saying something very unique. So very different strategy. When I did seminars, we had a really cool strategy. I would go to the list owner mailing pieces and I'd already made most of them and I'm trying to be Arrogant. Millions of dollars. So they were willing to sign the most outrageous and audacious letters for me. But the first thing we would do is send a letter out offering a one day $50,000 private consult.

Right.

That's what I was charging then. And, and we would feel blessed if we got one. It would, it would break even, you know, the 100,000 piece mailing. But it was audacious. Then we'd write behind it with a letter from the endorser saying. So many of our people contacted me and said that that was the most audacious offer they'd ever heard. How can anybody charge $50,000? This is, I'm talking about 25 years ago for a day of their time. But somebody who could must be interesting and talented and skilled enough. Is there any way you could figure out how to make him affordable? And then the letter said, I asked. JD said sure. Get 500 people together for five grand. Economies of scale. I'll do it. Then we would do the seminar. We'd sell out. Then we'd go behind and say so many people said they couldn't attend. Is there any way they could experience it themselves? Then we would do the home study that way. Then we go behind and sell Mr. X. And then we'd start over again. We also did a reversal of that. One of the things that I think, just an observation, and you're so much closer to it, that the online world today has lost track. They understand funnels, but I don't think they understand nuances. I think nuances are very important and it's different than funnels. To me, it's semantics. It's understanding how to really distinguish and position. It's all kinds of things that are the nuclear part of the whole process.

One of the things that I learned earlier in my career is what you want to be able to do is put into words what gnawing and abstract amorphous drivers are making somebody really crazy. Whether it's a goal they want to achieve or a problem they want to try to extricate themselves for. And most of them have never put it into clarified words in their subconscious. The marketer that learns how to do that with authenticity owns that mind share far and away, above and beyond everyone else they're competing against. Most of them try to do it with a lot of the same buzzwords and hyperbole and bullets and stacks of perceived value, real or otherwise. But there's a much more powerful way to do it. You take the category that your product, service or industry is attacking, addressing you go to Amazon.com for the last or any other book publisher to start with. I'll go down the hierarchy. For the last three years. You look at the last 25 bestsellers in each of those three years in the direct category and any related category. The first thing you look at are titles, subtitles, because regrettably, most books sell more by the promise than they do the content. Then you look at the chapter titles again, looking for resonating phraseology that nails it. And then this is the real key. Then you go to reviews, and I haven't done it lately, but I think Amazon is 0 to 5. So the zeros are negative, the fives are positive. People like Chris should understand this.

When you are passionate, positively or negatively.

Your subconscious overrides your conscious. If you think about somebody who's either pissed off or exuberant, sometimes you're shocked away from the vulgarity, the brilliance, the dimensionality, the clarity, the sinewy expression that they come up with is outrageous, good or bad. So you go through all the zeros, all the fives. You scrape them for all these books, three years, and all the related ones. And now you do the same thing for review sites. You do the same thing against your competition in every direct and indirect.

Now you overlay the good and the.

Bad hierarchy where they're the most frequent. And now you've got word phrases that none of your competitors and you're speaking to the subconscious. You can basically articulate exactly what you know they want and you deliver it such and such, because you're using word phrases that resonate with their subconscious. You can tell them what you don't do. This gives you headlines, sub headlines, copy approaches, primary positionings. It is infallible. And I do that for every client because I don't write copy anymore, but I do that so they can write masterful copy that kicks ass. You don't have to limit it to the books on your topic, any related topic. And it can be any kind of provider and even your competition anywhere in the world if you start doing this.

Your ability to empathically relate and have.

Them genuinely felt, understood, acknowledged, appreciated, empathized, is going to so trounce anybody else. I mean, I've done it enough times. It is about as infallible a success formula as you can have if you do it to fullness. It's really that powerful.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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