Jay Abraham Interview with Ken Hardison
Ken Hardison:Welcome everybody to the October monthly teleseminar. We have the great pleasure of having the infamous, famous, greatest coach in the United States and the world over, Jay Abraham. For those that don't know who he is, you need to find out. You can go to abraham.com…or is it jayabraham.com?
Jay Abraham:If you just want to bypass all the rhetoric, all the good stuff's on Abraham.com/profit resources. That's better for people.
Ken Hardison:He's got loads of stuff on there for free. He's the founder and CEO of Abraham Group in Los Angeles, California. He's spent his entire career solving problems and fixing businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000clients in more than 400industries, and over 7,200sub-industries worldwide. He has dealt with virtually every type of business, he has studied solving almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity, and this is the key to Jay as far as I'm concerned.
He has an uncanny ability to increase business income, wealth and success. He knows how to uncover hidden assets, overlooked opportunities and undervalued possibilities, and this has caught the attention and respect of CEOs, bestselling authors, entrepreneurs and marketing experts.
Jay plays in the big leagues, and we are very fortunate to have him with us here today. And, personally I can tell you I’ve probably spent over $30,000.00 for his materials over the years. I had to apply for it but got selected from people all over the world to be in a mastermind group and I've been in it since January of this year, and it has been tremendous, as far as the knowledge I've gained from it. I feel like we've become friends because I share my trials and tribulations. I don't care how successful you are, there's always some obstacle in the way and you're always trying to figure out how to go around it or over it or under or whatever to get up to the other side, and Jay has that uncanny ability to help you do that.
So I asked him, and he usually doesn't speak to groups this small, but I asked him if he would do it for me and he graciously gave up some of his time, and as Mark Cuban has said on the Shark Tank– time is valuable. You know, you can have the money but you gotta have the time…so I really, I understand that, Jay, and I appreciate you being with us here today. I really do.
Jay Abraham:It's my pleasure. It's great fun. So, hit me with your best shots and let's see what I can do to help and just tell me what I can do.
Ken Hardison:Well, most of our members are lawyers but I think of them as entrepreneurs. I know you've been all over the world. I know you're speaking over in Hong Kong and Singapore, and wherever, all over the country in China and I know you've done seminars where you charge people $25,000 and I know you charge people $50,000 for a one-day consult and people pay it.
So, what is the biggest mistake you see businesses, entrepreneurs, lawyers, whoever – people that are in business for profit – make and how can they avoid it?
Jay Abraham:That's a big global question.
Ken Hardison:Yeah, yeah…
Jay Abraham.That's okay. That's okay. Anybody that knows my work knows that there's three parts to my work. One is strategy, one's marketing and one is ideology or philosophy.
Ken Hardison:Okay.
Jay Abraham:So I'm gonna work backwards. The biggest thing we do for anybody we ever work with is install what we call a strategy of preeminence. And preeminence is pretty self-explanatory to you guys or girls. It's establishing yourself as the only viable solution in the marketplace, the only trusted source they would turn to. The entity, the person, the service, the product that understands them better than anything else. You can't be preeminent if you don't first turn your attention externally.
You have to understand how they think, what it's like to be them, walk in their shoes.
Let me give you the short course, because it would take a couple hours to explain it. But the key to being strict, to being preeminent is first of all, try to be able to demonstrate in phrases and words that you understand what they are feeling, what they want, want they want to get away from in verbiage they've never even been able to put their own mind into, because that shows them…well, that gives them clarity. When they get clarity it gives them understanding. When they get understanding, they get power and the person who gives people power owns them. The key to being preeminent is telling them exactly what they need to do and why they need to do it and not, you know, pussyfooting and trying to win their trust by being patronizing or pandering.
Let me give you some short ones. It's taking them into the future and showing them what it will be like, and I'm sure in your profession you can't assure them but you can show them good and bad. They call it the Dickens Pattern. What it's like if they don't do anything, if they don't try to, you know, get their rights and all, all kinds of things that are denominating a picture in their mind.
The key to being preeminent really is a very simple distinction. You may love the law. You may love outwitting the competition. You may love killing people in brilliance, you know, intellectual integration. They love mastering interrogatories and depositions. But the truth is if you’re going to be preeminent, you fall in love with the client and you live to make their life better and protect them and, and there's a wholelitany of things.
In the ideological, philosophical, it's being preeminent. In the business standpoint, most people are not strategic. I presume from your training you got critical thinking training but I do not know if you're very strategic. Strategic has a lot of elements. The number one element in being strategic is having a business model that keeps working harder and harder for you and keeps generating the most high quality of prospects and has the greatest conversion migration process. Being strategic is if you understand that referrals, for example, are a critical and a more viable source of cases and business than anything else you do, having at least one and, and preferably three, four, five. We know 93 different referral-generating strategies and systems and work all the time, not just intermittingly hoping that your advertising and your words and your successes will build clients. Although they will but that's intermittent, that's episodic, that's dumb. You want to really get the strategy in place. There's lots of different options.
The next thing is highest and bestuse theory. Anybody in commercial real estate knows what that is, but I'll give you a quick summary. If I owned an old beat-up house in the middle of a primelocation in the heart of Beverly Hills next to the Rodeo Hotel and I wanted it appraised, they wouldn't appraise it as a two-bedroom, 800-square foot house. They'd appraise the land if it was converted to its highest and best use. Highest and best use theory applies to lots of things. It particularly applies to marketing. It applies to the message. It applies to the process. I've been trained…I've worked, you know, years ago, just so you have a little edification, Decision Quest was a client of mine. Anybody who doesn't know it –
Ken Hardison:I know who they are.
Jay Abraham:– they were, and they still are the largest litigation consulting strategist in the field. Also, the Deming organization which was the father of process improvement and optimization was my client, and so was, the world's largest multi-variable testing organization. I tell you this quickly because there are a lot of impact points. Just like there are probably impact points in a case and each one has leverage or can be a deterrent.
You have to understand your business and as a business you've got lots of parallel universes going on. So one is being strategic, not tactical, and it goes into a long explanation. Most companies I look at, most businesses I look at, I would venture to say most law firms are tactical.
Finally, if you are going to be a marketer, you've got to maximize your marketing. And you maximize your marketing through a number of things. First, is testing. You test all kinds of elements – because I was in the lead generating business and the lead generating business can be a case generating business, and people weren't very discerning about quality, quantity, convertibility, or timeline of convertibility…. You’ve got to be able to look at all those things.
I'm not, I don't know if I'm giving you a composite, difficult, attention-deficit sort of an answer, but there's a lot of elements that are the most important. But the most important, probably if you summarize them all and integrate them all, is having a proposition – a reason why they should choose you over everyone else that is so, emotionally/intellectually compelling is that there's no choice. And it moves people to action. The key to everything: nothing happens until somebody acts. That's sort of a derivative of Einstein and relativity. And you've got to get people to act and you've got to get them to act because they see you as the solution to their problem and the solver who's more capable, more effective, more empathic, more whatever it is, at a level no one else is. And it's axiomatic, but that's really it. Sorry, Ken, if it's a long one.
Ken Hardison:What you said was you got to fall in love with your client, and I've read this somewhere. I don't take credit for it. But it said, where most lawyers fail or businesses, is they fall in love with their business, not their clients. And that’s a danger zone.I think trial lawyers especially start becoming successful and they think they got it figured out and they've got big egos. And I'm one so I can say that without, you know, because the truth is the truth. It's not a bad thing. I mean, actually the best trial lawyers have the biggest egos, I think, because they're very confident and they have to go in there and convince people and so that's a good thing. But you can't reach as much of your….
Jay Abraham:There's a very fine line, Ken, between confidence, arrogance and hubris.
Ken Hardison:And then, the other thing you were talking about is strategic versus tactical and I think, I've tried this way before. But,the deal is thattactical was justto run an ad in the Yellow Pages…or we're gonna do these TV commercials or whatever saying if you're hurt, call me. It’s about instead of figuring out who or what your case is to look at where, where all the money's coming from and say okay, if I know most of my money's coming from ten injury cases or so, how strategically….
Well, I was sitting there and thinking about what kind of accidents people get in that have head injury cases. Well, a lot of them are motorcycle accidents. They can be everywhere and you can sit there and look at your database and see where they came from and then figure okay, strategically I want head injury cases and I know that they come from these type of accidents, and so where do these happen, where can I go to before these people go…you know, before and after? Ask what does my ideal client look like and go ahead and market and then figure out the tactics…the spokes in the wheels. The big wheel is the strategy, you know, the rubber around it. But, the spokes that hold it together are kind of, are little spider webs…it’s the tactics that you go out there and use to, to get that ideal client. Am I right or am I wrong as far as this way?
Jay Abraham:Yeah, you are. You are. I mean, if you look at, at most people, you're exactly right. Most people do things episodically, intermittingly, they don't integrate. They're short term in their design obviously. And everyone needs to carry cash load or carry cash or cases or whatever for your practice. But being strategic is, when you're strategic you don't do anything that doesn't advance and enhance a master strategy. And the strategy is very well defined and it is basically maximizing whatever positioning, whatever access and assets you have, and they can be different things.
Jay Abraham:I mean, I recommend every one of you write a book or get a book written and give it away and make it a really provocative book. I'm not in that business…I don't want to be in that business. I can tell Ken some people in that business that do it but –
Ken Hardison:We do it. And we actually like to do it.
Jay Abraham:So the point is, I'm helping you but not knowingly because you want to distinguish yourself. You gotta have…I used to do a unique selling proposition and that was the advantage over everybody else. But I moved to preeminence 'cause preeminence is quantum leaps. It's much more…it's strategy that is so heightened and impenetrable. When you become preeminent you own the market. Preeminence can be, it doesn't have to be the $10million cases. You can be the preeminent $30,000.00 case person, the preeminent advocate of a category of business, the preeminent, whatever you want. Butyou have to have strategy. I'll give you an example. I used to do seminars, and I would do seminars that were…I'm 64. When I was in my 30s and 40s we did a quarter billion dollars a seminar. It was quite a bit for the time. I burnt out doing it. But when I did them, we would never go to the outside market. It was a waste. We did it a couple times, and I'll tell you a story. We would go hoping, there's a – I got to tell a story, Ken. I'm sorry.
Ken Hardison:That's okay.
Jay Abraham:And I am a poster boy for adult attention deficit. A friend of mine, a great, great marketer at one time, I was doing a seminar for him and he had asked a question. If you could have a restaurant in your city and you could have any single advantage, what would you want it to be. And he'd go around the room and somebody would say I want the only McDonalds, I want the only Chinese restaurant, I want the only restaurant at the convergence of five highways, etc. etc. He'd say, oh, fine, fine. You can have that. After everyone's done, he'd say, you know what I want? I want a starving crowd.
Ken Hardison:That's right.
Jay Abraham:And a starving crowd really means how can you ethically and legally get the greatest direct access to the market you want. And surprisingly there are a lot of ways. I know you guys have regulatory constraints and I know you have a lot of, of issues that are constraining and that you can't do. However, there's always ethical ways to figure out who has already got the market you want and how to preemptively get access to them in some kind of a tangible or intangible compensation that is in to the correct side of decorum.
I'm going back to what I used to do. We figured out who had the market. We, in the early day of investments before everybody became an investor, the investment newsletters, before the Internet, they all had people who had money. They were doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs. Tony Robbins even though he was rah, rah…and about 5percent of his market were entrepreneurs who achieved great success and thought it was gonna transform their life and they were still, you know, and they were still depressed and unhappy, and we found lots of different people like that. And we would go to them. And we never paid for advertising. We paid for results. You can't do that…but we found the most direct path and everything we did was, was about five times more viable than just going to the outside market and paying for 100percent of the market when maybe 3 or 4 percent of them were our markets.
Separately our strategy was we go to this, these lists – and I charge $50,000 a day when I consult. I usually work on contingency like a lot of you, but a $50,000a-day fixed rate gives you a great contrast. So we would go to somebody's affinity group and we would send a letter from that person, a hard letter offering them Jay Abraham at $50,000 a day. I would normally get a couple of people and would break even from the first communication.
And then we'd go after the second one to everyone else. And so many people were intrigued, provoked and yet they thought I can't afford or why would I want to afford that. But they said is there any other way we can work with him? And we said yeah, Jay's willing to do a new group and we ended up doing, at first we were $15,000 a piece and we got down to small ones at $5,000 a piece where they could come to the program. And we did very well. We had thousands of those. Then we pulled those names off and we'd go back and then we'd say – so the people wanted to do it but their time or their budget didn't work. And then we sold what we called on site, the videos and the audios for half price. And then we'd take those off and say so many people wanted to do it but they just couldn't justify it, and we sold a $400 starter kit that got credit for it.