"Much of this book is focused on how you can improve your business life and career. But the strategies also work in virtually any aspect of life where you need to persuade others to accept your position or ideas."
- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, page 4
"Your goal is to eliminate as much, if not all, of the risk in the transaction for your client. When you take away the risk, you lower the barrier to action and eliminate the primary obstacle to buying."- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, page 21
The whole book is based on Jay’s concept that there are only three ways to increase revenues in your business. We can (1) increase the number of clients we service, (2) increase the average dollar size of the sale per client, and (3) increase the number of times (frequency) clients return to make a purchase.
Have you thought about ways you could increase these three fundamental factors to drive the growth of your business? Jay goes on to outline the “geometric growth formula”.
This formula simply stated says: Our number of clients X (times) the transaction value per client X (times) the total number of transactions per year yields (equals) our total income. This is nothing more than the three fundamental factors listed above and outlined in an easy to implement formula. A small increase in any of these three factors produces a geometric increase in the total. How could you go about increasing just one of these factors in some small way? What if you could increase each of these factors in some small way? How would that impact your total income?
Jay makes what I think is a very important distinction between the words customer and client. A customer is a person who purchases a commodity or service. A client, on the other hand, is a person who is under the protection of another. That must be why your tax lawyer calls you a client and not a customer. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is a tax lawyer that views my business as a commodity. I prefer protection! How do you view those who purchase your products, solutions, or services? Do your purchasers and probable purchasers view you as a commodity or protector? Marketing is really about communicating the message that you serve clients and not customers. Think of your clients as dear, valued friends.
"You can’t maximize your performance or make the most money unless you know how to make the best use of your time, opportunities, efforts, and investments… The odds are good that you are currently underperforming and not reaching your real potential because you’re depending on the wrong actions or approaches for your success."- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, page 145
Jay wants us to understand that our personal success and prosperity is tied to our ability to create our own breakthroughs. He wants us to work smarter – to skip levels and make quantum leaps. He provides a very important example from his own experience. We need to borrow ideas, processes, thoughts, and technology from other industries. Take the study of what works from a totally unrelated industry and re-formulate those success principles for implementation in your business (or industry).
These breakthroughs can only come about with the proper mind-set. You have to be open to your environment and everything it offers. Look at old things with a fresh perspective. Discover hidden opportunities in every situation. Try and uncover a cash windfall every three months (see “Shake Your Money Maker” above). Work at engineering maximum success into every decision you make. Develop multiple streams of idea generation (think outside your current business and industry). Make the things around you special and unique – this includes your business, home, mode of transport, etc. Create more value for your employees, clients, and stakeholders.
Jay suggests you keep a breakthrough list of ideas for implementation. In The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman spoke of a personal R & D program; a process that ties in nicely with this concept. You could use Josh’s program for personal development to help generate ideas for your “Breakthroughs” list. How many breakthrough ideas could you generate in a 30 minute brainstorming session? Would a mind-map be a good tool to help with this process?
"Having a reachable goal is more important to your success and financial prosperity than almost anything else you do."- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, page 337
Whatever our industry, we are in the prospect and client generating business. The basic goal of all marketing is to gain, retain, and grow our client base. Jay recommends developing “host-beneficiary relationships designed to create win/win profitability opportunities.” In essence, our partners profit from our marketing and we profit from theirs. Who could you approach about setting up this type of business relationship? This is a piggy-back coat-tails principle very similar to that used by charge card companies. In this example (one of many, and we are only limited by our mind-set), a charge card company has complimentary offers sent with their monthly statement. The Charge Card company gets to offer specials to their audience, the advertisers get inexpensive advertising to a whole new audience. As another example, a landscaper could partner with a lawn pest-control company in a similar fashion.
Jay goes on to describe the birth and implementation of a referrals program. He focuses on building consistency into that program and experimenting with incentives to promote referrals from your existing client base. He further outlines how a solid referral program can off-set the natural business attrition cycle. Thus, you can substantially grow your business in spite of attrition. An even better formula is growing your business through referrals while dramatically reducing attrition through a systematic process. How could you implement a systematic program to generate and grow your referrals while simultaneously reducing the attrition of current clients?
As much as things change—and marketing has definitely changed—the fundamentals remain the same. We do ourselves an injustice by getting caught up in the noise at the expense of those essentials. Jay Abraham’s Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got will put you back in touch with what marketing is really all about – generating and keeping profitable business by implementing an ethical and consistent program. If you are looking to rekindle and retool your marketing basics and possibly add some new ideas to the mix, I highly recommend you get a copy and start studying today. Tomorrow, everything may change again, but the fundamentals will always remain relevant.
As the founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, Jay has spent the last 25 years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide. Jay has seen and dealt with every type of business you can imagine. And he’s studied and solved every kind of business question, problem, challenge and opportunity.
