The Home Service Expert Podcast - Jay Abraham: Using The Strategy of Preeminence to Catapult Yourself Above Your Competitors

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Jay Abraham is one of the world’s top marketing strategists and business innovators. Jay is the founder and CEO of The Abraham Group, Inc., and has been a coach and mentor to over 400 experts, including some of the biggest names in various industries. He has spent over three decades solving problems and increasing the bottom lines of more than 10,000 clients from a thousand industries and over 7,200 sub-industries worldwide. In this episode, we talked about marketing strategy, marketing consulting, entrepreneurship, business development, copywriting...

You have a couple of choices in your life in business. You can be a commodity, you can be mediocre, or you can be preeminent and catapult above the maddening crowd in the category that they need to talk to irrespective of whether they buy or not. You want to be seen as the only viable solution they can turn to. You want to have a perspective that is different than everyone else, so a different way of looking at it that makes sense to them. You want to give them enough knowledge, not just go to the bottom line, but give them enough knowledge so that they can get great focus, great certainty, make decisions themselves because they own it and the power is in them. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring,

and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have a very, very special guest. I'm going to read all of the accomplishments he's got. So let's just get started. It's Jay Abraham. It's an honor to have you on, and I'm going to tell the story here. Marketing strategy, marketing consulting, entrepreneurship, business development, copywriting. He's the owner of the Abraham Group from 1982, a year before I was born, to now. Listen to this. I don't normally go over this, but his social media following, over 18,000 on LinkedIn, 50,000 on Facebook, 68,000 on Twitter, 14,000 on Instagram, 21,000

on YouTube. He's the founder and CEO of the Abraham Group. He has spent the last 30 years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries and over 7,200 sub-industries worldwide. Recognized as one of the world's top marketing strategists, business innovators, entrepreneurial advisors, and mentors, and master of revenue and performance enhancement and acceleration. He's the one that coined the unique selling proposition, and he's the host of a podcast called The Ultimate Entrepreneur. And it's a pleasure to have you on, Jay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tommy.

Let's just get started here. You're recognized as one of the most successful professionals in the field of marketing, copywriting, advertising. The people you hang out with as well as yourself. It's just, it's a different level. It's another element. You guys have kind of wrote the book and you're passing the baton in some ways to guys like me. I don't know if you know this, but in Scottsdale, you ever heard of the book, The Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins? Well, sure. I know Tom. So he lives here and I've met him once. And it's just crazy that the guys that I've studied before, recently I had Michael Gerber on. It's just amazing. And now you're on. So tell us a little bit about where

you're at today, what you've done your whole life. I know you've been involved in a lot of real estate, thousands of businesses. Tell us what you've been up to. Well, I mean, pre everything happening, I was traveling the world doing very large groups. And at the same time for the last five or six years, Tommy, I've had very high end, expensive and extensive clients that I've been brought in to solve what we call untangled Gordian knots. But since this has happened, I've started doing some fun things. I've started working with groups. I've started getting deeper involved with businesses where I got a piece of the upside for helping them make what they're doing and how they're doing it better. I've done a lot of interviews. We have

come out with some new products and programs, and I'm doing a lot of different things, but more that are involved in getting more deep into the hub of what's going on with either an industry. I think I told you I've done HVAC, I've done commercial, I've done residential real estate people all over the world. I've done chiropractors, I've done dentists, I've done, I mean, I've done so many different industries. It's funny, but it's helped me understand all kinds of alternative ways, Tommy, to think, act, transact, build a revenue stream, a strategy, marketing approaches, because I've had the benefit of what's called funnel vision, which is taking ideas from all kinds of industries that are common as dirt in those industries, but are not known in many other

industries and distilling them, combining them together into hybrids, and then introducing them into industries that have never been exposed to them. It explodes people. So I've been very blessed because I've helped, geez, over 400 experts, many of which you would be familiar with. You talk about Michael Gerber. I met him when he was started. Tony Robbins, Joe Polish, Roland Frazier. I've helped all kinds of entrepreneurs, but in helping them, they didn't come to me for help with their methodology. They wanted me to help them make their methodology more desirable, more differentiated, more high value perceived, but I had to learn it. So I've been exposed to three, 400 different expert methodologies, ideologies, and it's given me an understanding

of how to look at a business or a competitive situation from a spectrum. It's more of a cat scan that most people couldn't, I think. I don't know if that helps. Oh, it does. I mean, ultimately, you know, most of the listeners are in the home service space. And it's funny because people kind of overlook it. They say the plumber, the average plumber is 48 years old right now. And people aren't getting into it as much, the millennials.

And as I think about it, you know who is getting into it? Google, Facebook, Amazon. And I was the first one to test out Amazon Home Services. They failed. They got back in it and they're missing the main piece and it's the company, the culture. They're trying to do the Uber. Everybody could drive a car and get you to a place. A home service company has so many more attributes that we think about and people want it done fast. This is what I love. You'll love this one. My dad taught me this. They want it done fast. They want it done right. And they want it done cheap.

Pick two out of the three and here's what you get. I love it. So tell me a little bit about, I mean, there's so many things I want to talk about. My passion is sales and marketing. You're the guru. Let's talk a little bit about, I mean, I've got just so many things on this piece of paper. Let's talk about redeployment. Let's talk about turning companies into multiple companies. How does that work? Well, there's a lot of ways that it works. First of all, let's take home services because people don't think about something. If it's not an emergency, there's two kinds of home services, emergency and what I'll call cosmetic. If it's an emergency, then you have to decide how to turn a one-time

sale into a larger one ethically. And that gives you multiple times more profit from the investment in the relationship with the buyer. But if it's a cosmetic sale, what people don't realize, and I've done this all my life for clients, Tommy. So let's say you are in one facet. Okay, you're a great idea. You are in the garage door business, right? Yes, sir. Okay. So I'm sitting around looking at my house, the door maybe works creaky, ugly, noisy. I want to fix it. So now you come and you beautify the very first focal part that I see when I drive into my driveway or approach the house. I'm going, this looks great. Then I walk in, I see my front door looks like crap. Then I walk in and I see my kitchen is shoddy. Then my bathrooms. If you look at

probability and outcome, there is a very high incidence in a very rapid order that when people get one part of their home, particularly if it's external beautified, it contrasts to things inside and there is a very high incidence of those same people doing multiple things, probably usually the kitchen, then it might be the bathrooms, might be the closets, the backyard, landscaping, fire pit, whatever you want to talk about, roof. But if you are in the catbird seat where you had the first access to them, you're in the position to either refer, partner, joint venture, make a deal with a provider where it's a private label and you can quintuple the value of the relationship, the sunk cost and what it took to get the sale. So that's the first thing. Another way of looking

at it, Tommy, is if you know you can fill or feed all these other ancillary but very profitable home improvements, whether they be emergency or cosmetic. Once you quantify it, you can go out and find providers that have pieces of the puzzle. They're bad marketers. They have erratic sales, but they have a quality of performance and values. And you can acquire, you don't even have to acquire the business. I don't even want the business because you get the liability. You acquire the name, the URL, the intellectual property, the people, and then the owner who basically is trying to be an entrepreneur and isn't can go out

and sell. It's probably what he or she did better. But when you look at it, if you think, what else do people buy before, during, after, instead? When you identify that, it's extraordinary. Even if somebody doesn't buy from you and they're looking, you can have another deal with either a private label or a different garage door, and you can monetize the people that didn't. It's controlling the totality ethically of the buying. I guess I'd call it dynamic. I don't know if that makes sense, but I give you lots more.

Well, I understand that completely. You know what, for example, pest control. Yes. I love this. So people will say, why would you partner with a pest control? Well, the number one entryway of bugs into your home is the bottom of your garage door. Okay. Simply my buddies that visit me all the time and I visit them, they own some of the largest pest control companies in the world.

And all I tell them is start going around. When I go into a new city, I want to get the 10 largest pest control companies. They book it through my portal, which is called Schedule Engine. And it looks at my capacity and they get a check every week for selling bottom rubber. And they make themselves look great. These are simple little things that a lot of week for selling bottom rubber. And they make themselves look great. These are simple little things that a lot of people don't think about. And, you know, a little secret sauce. I give the listeners a lot. So this one they're going to have to write down. But I use a software that tells me every single person that takes an equity line out of their home.

Why would they take a second mortgage or an equity line? Because they want to do repairs. Why not write them a letter right when I see that they took an equity line, a handwritten letter. So I'm a big, big fan of remonetizing the same lead. Because there's one thing I know for sure, he who pays more per lead will always win. If I could outpay you, and let's jump into that because you're the marketing genius. You know, I'm good buddies with Ken Goodrich with Gettle. And his philosophy is he owns the radio. There's a good guy named Roy Williams. I got his book. He's a smart guy. He works with Ken. He works with a lot

of these guys like the Shane company. And their goal is to own 50% of the population hear his ad three times on the radio per month. And if that happens, he thinks, and he's proving it, that he'll have more business. And Roy seems to think that radio is still the best vehicle to build a brand and build your story. I'm curious to hear your take on that. Well, let me think if I can back out the concept. I believe in accessing your market from a multitude of vantage points. I created years ago the power Parthenon theory of having many different approaches and access vehicles to a market, each one of which complementing your main one. I think radio is good if you buy it

right. I think the key to radio is being able to access a market. I like marketing arbitrage. I'll give you a simple example. I had a company for a couple of years, and if you listened to Sirius, you would know about them. And they were tooling along at about $30 million. And now they're doing 120 a year and a half later. And the only thing we did was they were doing localized advertising on radio and they were doing Facebook. But I have contacts with people who can buy radio on a remnant basis for 80% off. And it's probably even cheaper now because it's been so decimated. But at 100%, radio is hard to make work.

If you can buy 80% off, all of a sudden it can be very profitable. They were able to buy Sirius Satellite and CNN, Bloomberg. And then when that worked, they were able to buy at 80% off all the networks and they sell timeshare cancellation services, you probably heard, and they just killed it. But I think it's not just radio. I think it's very important that you understand direct response, that you don't waste opportunity and you don't let whoever is representing you do what's called institutional advertising. message has to be provocative and evocative, meaning it's got to stimulate my interest and then compel me to at least want to find out more, have my house looked at, get an estimate. I think you've got to experiment because there's so many variables, Tommy, that can increase or decrease the response or the quality. I was in the lead generating business with somebody for two years,

and we generated about 6 million leads. And most of the people generating leads seem to think that all leads are worth the same. It's bullshit. Different sources of leads are worth more or less, different subject-based leads are worth more or less, different source, subject, product, service coming in are worth more or less. And if you don't know what leads are worth more or less different source subject product service coming in are worth more or less and if you don't know what leads are worth you're spending too much or too

little you're never spending the right amount you should know what different categories of leads are worth first of all and how many of this category convert second Second of all, what's the average unit of sale? Third, what's the revenue from that? Fourth, what's the upgrade? Fifth, what's the residual value? And residual value can be resale. If that's all you sell is garage doors, it can be JV. If you're now connected to a roofing company, a kitchen company, it can be what's it worth in referrals and if you don't know all that you're either spending too much or too little when you know that you have what's called an allowable cost which differs by different areas maybe you can run on the radio and the radio pulls leads that convert one out of ten and they're worth two grand and you cost you $30 a lead. So you're spending

300 to get a sale and the sales worth 1500 and 15 minus the 150 the salesperson gets is now 13.5 and you spent three and you make 2000 or it's gonna be a thousand whatever, but maybe there's another source that the leads cost you double, but they convert three times and the average sale is priced that. So you have to know that. I'm not trying to give everybody a headache, but if you don't know those and you don't play around with what happens if you add one more dimension. Also, the key to most marketing, whether it's online,

whether it's radio, whether it's radio, whether it's print, is you've got to be able to telegraph a premise, a promise, a benefit, an outcome, a resolve, an advantage, a better situation that relates, an underscore of something very bad that they've never thought about. Most copy, and again, I know Roy Williams is supposed to be very good. I'm not familiar with his copy. I have heard very good things about his results. But if you're localized, the worst thing you can do is let the radio station write your advertising because I was in the radio business and I would get people who'd never been in before to give me a $5,000 schedule when that was a lot of money.

I didn't know how to write copy back then. We had a copywriter on staff and his claim to fame, Tommy, was he could write a 60-second commercial in 60 seconds. And it would usually bomb and I'd ruin people for posterity. There's a lot of elements in any form of marketing, radio marketing, space marketing, strategic alliance marketing, referral marketing. And if you don't understand all the nuances that affect something, the leverage points, you're going to under yield, undervalue, underperform the opportunity, the investment. And that's not necessary once you stand back and understand some of this stuff. I love the direct response. I read a book recently called No BS About Direct.

Was that Dan Kennedy? Yeah, Dan Kennedy's collection of the no BS and genius stuff. I love Remnant. And Remnant basically means for the listeners that if you ever go on golf now or anything, it just means that they've got space or hotels do it. Airlines do it. Any space, the last minute they'll do it cheaper because it's actually an opportunity cost not to fill those seats up when they're flying somewhere. Or the golf courses, the golf course is already built. You might as well get people through there, even if you got to give it away cheaper. One of the things you talk about is preeminence, the culture mindset. Let's talk a little bit about, I love marketing. I want to go

back to that, but I want people to get familiar with some of the phrases that you've coined. So talk about preeminence for a little bit. Sure. So about 30 years ago, I had the good fortune of serving a client that actually taught me more than I taught them. They were the number one company in their category by order of magnitude of three or four times. They were more profitable by more than that. They had larger units of sale. They had longer conservation. People stayed with them longer. They had more cross-sell. They had a greater team, much more analytical. And I traded a half a million dollars of my time helping them for the privilege of spending five days interviewing everybody in the organization. The owner had come from Bain, and he used very sophisticated strategy and systems to

create this. And I wanted to know what defined them. And I created 1, thousand pages of notes. That's the backstory. And I distilled it down to a bunch of talking points. But here's a short version. You have a couple of choices in your life in business. You can be a commodity, you can be mediocre, or you can be preeminent and catapult above the maddening crowd in whatever category or service you offer. In order to do it, you start by establishing yourself as the most trusted advisor in the category that they need to talk to irrespective of whether they buy or not. You want to be seen as the only viable solution they can turn to.

You want to have a perspective that is different than everyone else, so a different way of looking at it that makes sense to them. You want to give them enough knowledge, not just go to the bottom line, but give them enough knowledge so that they can get great focus, great certainty, make decisions themselves because they own it, the power is in them. You want to be able to put into words, Tommy, the feelings that they are struggling with in their subconscious, hopes, dreams, torment, anger, and you want to do it in a way that you are the first person ever to have done it

relative to that application. So you own their mind share and there's a way to do it. And I'll tell you that in a minute. You want to be able to have an attitude that you, if you know that what you and your company does, product service people, produces a meaningfully superior outcome for the client above and beyond everyone else you compete against in your market. You have a moral responsibility, you have a privilege, you have an obligation to be the one serving them and not the competition, not because the competition are a bunch of pricks, but because the client is going to be deserved. Speaking of client, if you're going to be preeminent, you think of the people you are dealing with as clients, not as customers. The reason why we're dealing with your mindset.

Psychologically, if you look up in Webster's dictionary, the definition of customer, it is somebody who buys, I'm sorry, I'm rolling and I have a squeaky chair, commodity or a service. So if you say you are my customer, you're saying I am no better than anybody else. There's nothing distinguishing me, quality, people, outcome. I am generic. I am Mr. Commodity. You look at the definition of client, it's someone under the care, the protection, the well-being of another, much more elevated, much more fiduciary. You want to be able to do something very different. Most people fall in love with the industry they're in

or the company they are building. That is limiting. If you want to be preeminent, you shift. You fall in love with the clients you serve and you live in a world where you hurt when you see an ugly or dysfunctional door and you luxuriate and you celebrate when you see the transformation you've made because you know every day they come home, every day people see their home, every day they drive into the drive, they're going to feel greater and greater. And if you're talking about stops on the bottom that protect them from termites or rodents, you know, they're going to do that. But you're living in the implication and the outcome, not just the transaction. You use language that nobody else has. And I'll tell you how to do that. There's a concept I came up with, Tommy, many years ago, and I call it the rule of business. And it's pretty cool.

What it means is this. If you take whatever you do in the service industry, there is either going to be books out there on that subject, or there's going to be review sites out there on that subject. Or if you study the country or any English-speaking part of the world, there are going to be reviews of people other than you who do that. If you go to the review sites, if there are books, you want the titles and the subtitles of the books because most books sell on the promise, not on the content. You want to scrape it off.

You want to scrape off if they have good chapter titles because these resonate to people. If there are no books, then you want to go to review sites if there are general ones, and you want to strip off the very best and the very worst reviews. If there are none of those, you want to go to sites where every kind of equivalent service can be in your market or any market you want. You want to see the great ones and the bad ones. Now that you've got all of this scraped comment, you have to realize something very profound, Tommy. People don't think about

this, but when people are passionate, positively passionate, negatively passionate, their conscious subordinates and their subconscious takes over. And by the way, people go, oh, you're unconscious. If you're unconscious, you're in a coma. You're subconscious. So when you're subconscious, if you think about this, anybody you've ever seen that's either really thrilled, happy, or really pissed, unhappy, if you back out the vulgarity, sometimes it's amazing how clear and dimensional and precise and shockingly impactful the words come out of their mouth. Well, that's true on the positive, the five reviews, and it's equally as true on the negatives, the zeros. Now, if you scrape all of this from a lot of work,

and you put them into two sides, the negatives and the positives, then you analyze it, you're going to get about half of those phrases are going to be very similar and about half are going to be different. But when you put them together, you now are going to be able to have a power none of your competitors have ever, ever contemplated. You're going to be able in your advertising, in your phone communication, in your ads, in your onsite, in your selling approach, in your post-sales upgrade to speak exactly to the subconscious about what you know they really want, tangible, intangible, and give them certainty about what you know they don't want, they're not going to get. And that may sound simple, but that's a game changer, Tommy.

Yeah. So I'm contemplating basically creating a scraper is what you're saying. Scrape Yelp. You know what's so funny? This is something else that no one ever thinks of, and I don't do a great job of it, but you know how easy it would be to go to Yelp and literally call all the one stars on all your competitors and say, let me come make it right. And it doesn't cost you a thing. And guess what? Literally, I think people care a lot about their time. And for some reason, so many companies compete on price. I don't know why so many people's and there's this, it's this mind shift of they go, yeah, but there's all these companies that are cheaper. I'm like, well, who are

you? Who's your customer? I look at this thing called regression testing. What's the average age? What's the income? What's your credit score? What do you know is in common within a standard deviation away about your clients? And very rarely, you know, you were talking earlier is, do you know your marketing sources? I've got 4,300 call tracking numbers that I look at conversion rate, average ticket. We look at our booking rate for those marketing sources. We look at our cost per acquisition. And these things are like uncommon in the home service space. And it's almost like we're playing chess and everybody else is playing checkers.

Beautiful analogy. But people don't realize that every one of those denominators, I mean, I work on what I call the geometry of the business, Tommy. I'm working in a way where this factor multiplying times this times this, it's not linear. It's asymmetric. that those kind of systems and focuses can double, redouble, redouble again your yield and thus your profit, your income, and the value of your business. You know, I've got another company and it's called Lead Geeks and I'm not as active in that company. I have a partner. We provide motivated seller leads. So what that means is when someone goes to the internet and they say sell my house for cash, we pop up a lot of the time. We work with partners that are, it's crazy the information and data out there.

I can find data that everybody that got turned down for a loan or a second mortgage, we could say, would you like to get a cash offer on your house? And it's a crazy business. And the reason I'm mentioning that is because we've talked about taking different ideas from other businesses. And so they set up farms in Philippines and these text messaging through a thing called Twilio. And they text message, they grab this data and pour it through. It's illegal, but they can't get caught up there in Mexico or Egypt or these other countries. So it's crazy to think that they're able to take this data and do mass text messaging, mass emailing. They do voicemail blasts. They use these different tactics. And I'm just, I'm curious of hearing some of the out-of-the-box thinking of what you've done to create lead generation.

Well, I mean, I've done lead generation for almost 40 years. You know, because you do so many industries, we have hundreds of ways to do almost everything. I'm a great proponent in referral generation. We have 224 ways to do it. Most people don't even have one, and yet their best buyers come from referral, cost them nothing, and they waste more of their time and effort on external marketing. I've done partnering deals with organizations. I've done co-branding with complementary businesses where I came up with the idea for my client and we got the other complementary businesses to pay for it. We have made deals with everybody that when they finish a job that is akin to what I said, the kitchen and the garage door looks like crap, they would automatically be prejudiced

and prepared to encourage people to talk to you and that they could have a deal, a discount or a voucher or an upgrade. We basically have about 28 ways to get more leads and buyers. And we've taken media that's not media and turned it into it. So if you look at all your local merchants, they usually will have a website, a URL, but most of them are doing it just for themselves. But if you went and said, I'd like to run ads on there, I'd like to have a segment on there or a session on there or an interview on there or a video on there, and I'll pay you either something for the privilege of doing it and testing it, if it works, continuing, or I'll give you so much to lead. We've done so

many things, Tommy, that I can't remember all the things. I don't know if that helps. I know, it's awesome. You know, and what makes me think is, I told you we talked a half an hour before we even got on this podcast and it's a great problem to have, but I can't get guys fast enough.

I mean, people say I always be closing. I say I always be recruiting. And I'm in a great problem to have because a lot of companies went out of business and we doubled up on our marketing when, you know, when everybody's selling you buy and vice versa, but it's hard to fulfill all these orders when it's like, like I said, it's like we make the phone ring and I don't even have to use outbound attempts, which is calling out. Or I like to build,

I talk about building a fence around your customers with a service agreement clients, excuse me. But I get two things. And rarely do people say leads are, for some reason in my mind, leads are easy to get and good leads are easy to get. The hard part is getting the great talent. And we're becoming, and it has to do with marketing, is recruiting. But how do you build that other half of it? How do you get the great people behind you?

And I've got a hundred. I'll give you a couple of different ways. Yeah. And I'll give you a macro strategy first. That was part of the, of what I learned from preeminence. The owner of it had a philosophy. He said, hire the best and cry only once. And I hope you get the implication of that. Yeah, well, it's expensive to hire the best, but yeah. But you can't hire the best if you don't know how to metric how much better they are. But secondly, many years ago, now every HVAC company in the world does the loss leader, winterize and summarize your system. But nobody did it when I started. We started it in Dallas and we didn't even know if it would work. I can't remember if ours was $29 or $19.

But we got so many thousands of respondents that my guy couldn't even handle it. And he was worried that it would stop. So he didn't want to hire more people, nor did he want to buy more equipment. And he thought that was a deterrent, but I didn't. We went into Dallas and found quality companies who had integrity, but were totally, totally underutilized. We made a deal where we gave them literally magnetic signs to put on their trucks. And we had the guys change shirts and we gave them a piece of the transaction for filling and selling until we got our own people in our own systems. And we were able to also observe great people and hire them. And we didn't steal hire them. We actually paid companies if we acquired them so we were honorable

but i think there's tons of non-linear things you can do in the interim there might also be parallel universes where there are people who are really good at maybe a little higher end install but they aren't doing that much business. And you could go to those companies and recruit either part of their time or just hire them. I've always been able to be a really good, critical, and consequential thinker, Tommy. And by that, I mean, I've been able to think about correlations, implications, analogies. If this is to this, what else is like that? Who else is out there? Who's not killing it right now? Who's really good at it, but they only do three installs a day and they could do, if there was garages,

eight. Who's out there and they're underutilized? Who's out there? And even if they're retired, if there's a function that's not heavy lifting, you can use your ingenuity and create it massively. Or you can buy a business for almost nothing just to get the team if you want to do it on the highest moral. But I can give you, I mean, anything you ask, I have to get my brain in alignment. Because as you know, I told you I was working on something and didn't have all my coffee and shower yet this morning. But it's not hard. If you said to me, Jay, I need 100 great installers in Los Angeles in two weeks, I don't know where to get them. I would sit down and give you probably 50 different ways to do it.

I love that. I think that it's thinking outside of the box and that's what you specialize in. You know, as I'm thinking about all these things, a lot of people listening, they're winners. They want to take over the industry. I want to change the industry. I think we could elevate the whole industry. A lot of people think it's same as 1990. They're charging the same prices and they don't understand what real customer service is all about and creating wow fans. Or one of my favorite book is Raving Fans. And ultimately, if you were going to change an industry, there's a guy named Jim Abrams. And this was a long time ago. He owned a company called One Hour Air. And he did it in air conditioning. And what he did is he got everybody on the same software. He created a huge best practices group. And then he put a hundred of them together one day. And it's just genius. Get them all on the same software, have them look up

to you and then have them the best practices where you can buy so much better with that brand. And then he did it in plumbing, the Benjamin Franklin, the punctual plumber. And then he did it in electrical, Mr. Sparky. And I just love the concept of conglomerating an industry, but also there's the organic approach. If you were going to just take over an industry, give me a few thoughts that come to mind on what you would do to just get started. I like, frankly, service, but I like repetitive service and complementary service. So if I was taking on an industry, I would figure out the best ways to start a relationship if it has repeat, because the sooner you on the first transaction because I'm playing a long game and I know what that's worth. I would have either options to buy, but I would have joint ventures with every complementary provider that provided anything

that was before, during, after, and instead would be competition. I'd probably have a deal with the competition where if I fed them enough, I'd get a share. And if it was so much, I'd get ownership of that business or I would start a competitor to compete against me, whether it's higher level, lower level, more custom. If I was going to use media, I would probably find an endorser, a lot of endorsers, but somebody who, depending on the target audience, tended to be in the most influential for that time. And one of my friends who does a lot of direct response marketing has found that B minus celebrities from a period that is maybe off the air or the movies are no longer popular, but the vintage that they were hot relates to the target audience.

Many years ago, he sold a hundred million dollars worth of timeshares using Tanya Roberts, who was one of the Charlie's angels girls, because the target audience related to her when she was hot in Vogue. He sold almost a billion dollars using Ed Asner, who young people wouldn't even know, but he was really hot and he stood for credibility and no nonsense on a comedy called

The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So I would do that. I would probably find big deals with media where they were tied into the result and they gave me either performance-based or lots of extra spots. But I would find everybody who was complimentary. I would do really cool marketing together where they paid. I conceptualized, but I got pieces of all their sales, but they didn't get pieces of mine because I masterminded it. The stuff. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny is Magnum PI, the guys all over.

Yeah, yeah. Look at him. And he's like, you know, reverse mortgages, right? He's selling the crap out of it. He's perfect in that audience oh it's great and i'll tell you what the best customers are the golden age of a little bit past baby boomers because they say i don't care i want it fixed right yeah literally you can find celebrity endorsers from that era and you can test it you know 10 20 grand against so much as sale or leave. And they love it because they, I mean, look, I was watching Joe Namath. Oh, yeah, Joe Namath.

He's all over the place. For basic, for Medicare supplements. And it's free. Yeah, Joe Namath. But I mean, and people don't understand. That's another, and it is, you can test it as an enhancer. And I would envelop my market, but I would be building the business for two things. Sustainability.

I would have tons of referral processes, by the way, because that multiplies the predictability. And also, it'll double or triple the profitability on transactions and thus move your blended profitability to a much higher level. But I would just do really cool things. I'm just going to have to flat and see you because I'm all about influencer marketing. Actually, there's people that will pay $100,000 for a wood table. Why not find that world-renowned 10 million follower woodmaker and say, I want you to build a signature series garage door line for everyone that sells that you exactly right and no you can do that all day long it's and that's brilliant and all of a

sudden it's not about the wood or or the competitive it's okay yeah you can get a three thousand dollar garage door but if you want a fifteen thousand dollar one one, that's an art form. That's one of only a thousand that'll ever be appear anywhere in the world on and it's numbered and it could arguably enhance the desirability of the house when you sell it. But every time you come home and leave, you're basically getting a boost of, of true artistry. Yeah. How much is that worth? It's 40% of your curb appeal. It's the only thing that gives 102% return on investment. And it's the smile of your home. You can't beat it. I always ask three questions. I know you got to get going. Do you have time for just the closing?

Yes, I do. So I always ask three books and they could be the Bible. It could be fiction. It could be something that influenced you, but three books that you'd recommend on the top of your mind. Sure. When I was young, I was introduced to some famous marketers from the 30s and the 40s when they didn't have the benefit of technology, graphic imagery, and they had to understand human nature and human condition. Two of them were from the same man, Claude Hopkins. He was the father of direct response, of reason why advertising, of preemptive advertising. And he wrote a book called Scientific Advertising. It's small. You can read it in the bathroom almost. And that was a distillation of his principles. And then another book is David Ogilvie's Confessions of an Advertising Man. But if you read those three, it will bring you back to foundation,

and you'll look at what you're doing or what your agency is doing or what whoever's creating your ads are doing, and most likely you'll want to stop them. So those are the things. And if somebody wants to reach out, you're a busy, busy man, but if someone wanted to get ahold of you or reach out, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, we do. And by the way, I do very expensive consulting. If enough people come together, I'll do group consulting. We have some very expensive programs and I can answer questions and problems, but it's very expensive. I love that. Yeah, it is. I'm just saying, but I'm always looking for people I can help.

And if you've got a big business with a lot of moving parts, I work on small fee and a high piece of the upside for a long period of time. So I'm interested. Send it to Desiree, D-E-S-I-R-E-E at Abraham.com. And I'd be happy to acknowledge any of you. And if it's not appropriate, I'm always grateful. And I hope this helped Tommy and had some ideas. Yeah, so the final thing is I'm going to turn it over to you

for the last few minutes, just final thoughts, something you want to leave the audience with one last gold nugget. Yeah, sure. So I have dedicated my life to identifying more high performance and exponential performing methods, mindsets, techniques, strategies, positionings, preemptive, competitively superior things you could do. And I've learned that you really have a lot more you can get out of time, opportunity, access to a market, interaction with a prospect or a buyer, team members, business community, media you're using. And when you realize and you have to study, so you'll get humbled about how much more you can do from same or less and for far less risk

and investment. My parting words are one from somebody else. I think it was Bob Proctor, but I love it. He said, most people in business struggle, Tommy, with the wrong question. They ask themselves non-verbally. They just are haunted by it. Am I worthy of this goal? I mean, am I going to be able to stay in business, make a living, compete against all the people that are coming into my market, all the options people have online, all the cost rising of products, rent, people.

Am I going to be able to be competitive and keep quality people and keep my marketing working and have a balanced life? He said that that's the absolute wrong question. more really is possible from time, from opportunity, from access to a market, from the interaction you have with that market, from what happens at the point of purchase and after they buy, what you can do with making media more profitable, what you can do by making your community more of a selling source, by what's possible by making all your team people perform better, more trusting, more interesting, more unified, and being on a mission together and manifesting your cultural and your strategic philosophy,

when you realize all that, the real question to start asking every day of every week of every month of every year, the rest of your business life is, is this goal worthy of me? Because most of them are not. That's my parting message, Tommy. Jay, this meant a lot to me and for the listeners. Couldn't be better.

It's a really pleasure to have you on. Thank you very much, Tommy. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me and I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.

And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward

slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it, to be completely frank with you guys. But I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.