As Founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc. (Los Angeles, California), Jay has spent his entire career solving problems and fixing businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries, and over 7,200 sub industries, worldwide. Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business. He has studied, and solved, almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity.
Jay has an uncanny ability to increase business income, wealth and success. He uncovers hidden assets, overlooked opportunities and undervalued possibilities. This skill set has captured the attention and respect of CEOs, best-selling authors, entrepreneurs and marketing experts. Jay’s clients range from business royalty to small business owners. But they all have one thing in common – virtually all of them have profited greatly from Jay’s expertise. Many clients acknowledge that Jay’s efforts and ideas have lead to millions of dollars of profit increase.
https://www.abraham.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #1014 - Jay Abraham
AUDIO - DUwHF #1014 - Jay Abraham
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Howard: It is just a huge, huge honor for me today to be podcast interviewing Jay Abraham of the Abraham Group. As founder and CEO of Abraham Group Inc., Los Angeles, California, Jay has spent his entire career solving problems and fixing businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over ten thousand clients in more than four hundred industries and over seventy-two hundred sub-industries worldwide. Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business. He has studied and solved almost every type of business question, challenge, and opportunity.
Howard: Jay has an uncanny ability to increase business income, wealth, and success. He uncovers hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, and undervalued possibilities. This skillset has captured the attention and respect of CEO's, bestselling authors, entrepreneurs and marketing experts. Jay's clients range from business royalty to small business owners, but they all have one thing in common. Virtually all of them have profited greatly from Jay's expertise. Many clients acknowledge that Jay's efforts and ideas have led to millions of dollars of profit increase and his bio goes on and on and on and on and on. I could read it all day.
Howard: I want to personally thank you on a couple of things. I've been a big fan of yours for many, many years, but I have four sons and your books have been passed around by my four sons. My Gregory, he can't believe that I'm podcast interviewing you today, he absolutely can't believe it. It goes all the way back to 1997 with your book Money-making Secrets Of Marketing Genius, 2000 Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got, 2009 The Sticking Point Solution, 2014 The CEO Who Sees Around The Corners, 2016 The MasterMind Marketing Systems, 2016 again, Extraordinary Referral Systems, Your Secret Wealth.
Howard: Really, you are unbelievable. How are you doing today?
Jay: I am well and after that, my ego is buoyed, I'm up to the strata. Thank you.
Howard: Well, Jay, it was a huge honor for you to come on the show because they talk about the perfect storm and the perfect storm is really hitting dentistry hard. In the last ten years, they've added, they've gone from like fifty Dental Schools to fifty-six, the existing class sizes have gotten bigger. The insurance companies, every year they keep lowering our fees. So there's this increased competition, Medicare, Medicaid, dental insurance companies want to pay less and less and less. And then, of course, inflation and overhead goes up. So, the competitive nature of dentistry is twice as competitive as when I got out of school thirty years ago. So what would you say to that dentist out there who's, feels like they're getting squeezed? Too many dentists, too lower prices?
Jay: I would say that you have to delineate between generic competition and viable competition. That there's a lot of noise and a lot of maddening crowds, but if you can distinguish, delineate not just yourself, but your ability to convey value and benefit and advantage in a superior way, you can still own your market.
Howard: I agree. How do you convince dentists of that?
Jay: Well, the first thing is you get them to travel outside their comfort zone. My whole skillset and I guess my reputation and my success history has been because I've been involved at this point in over a thousand industries. I've seen all the monumentally diverse ways the different industries market, they sell, they reach markets, they denominate value. Their business models, their ways of creating authority. I don't think that somebody spending their life in one business has the ability to see the options, the opportunities, the possibilities available and I tend to believe it happens in almost every industry or profession that most people pretty much do the same thing, pretty much the same way as everybody else. So you might be twenty or 30% better or worse, but it's going to be incremental. If you want to have exponential, explosive growth, it's not going to occur by doing the same thing everyone else does the same way and with the same belief systems.
Howard: It seems like whenever a dentist wants to work on their business, they want to go learn another dental procedure. It'd almost be like, let's say a restaurant was going out of business and the (unclear 0:05:10) best idea would say, well, let's add pizza to the menu.
Jay: That's a great analogy.
Howard: So how do you, how does a dentist and I get it because I'm a dentist, I just got back from the dental office literally ten minutes ago. There's nothing more fun for me than pulling wisdom teeth, doing root canals. It's my golf, but how do you get a dentist to start focusing on business? And specific to you, where should they start? Should they do what I did, go back to 1997, with your first book. Do you still recommend Money-making Secrets Of Marketing Genius?
Jay: Ironically, it has spawned more success stories than any of the books. I stopped, it was very expensive, we sold seventy-two thousand of them back then for I think three seventy-seven. I stopped offering it because it did not have a specific online component. However, all the methodologies and all the techniques are totally translatable and it's been re-referred to. In fact, Russell Brunson who's really big in online marketing, asked if he could sell it and I said, sure, as long as you add an update to it, but yeah, I think it's a really good book and we have. The other ones are very great too, but I think it goes back to something else. First thing, is a dentist has to learn, as anybody does, what's the real meaning of business life, number one.
Jay: Number two, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you just trying to have a job? Are you trying to build? There's many different denominators of compensation. Wealth is money, wealth is satisfaction, wealth is respect, wealth is relevancy, wealth is being able to command premium. I say this not to be arrogant. A typical marketing consultant gets $250, $300 an hour. We have, I would give a deal to somebody that's going to be a client, but if you just want a day with me, it's $100,000. Now I have a lot of knowledge, but how does one elevate their stature to be that much different. Well, you have to understand value creation because it's not just mystique, it's not just pompous, hyperbolic promotion. It's the ability to denominate value that is appreciated, respected, acknowledged by your target market above and beyond everybody else.
Howard: Well, I doubt many dentists could afford $100,000 for a day with you. So, but do you think that's a good start? That book from 2000, you said pass on the 1997, go to the 2000 (unclear 0:08:03).
Jay: No, no It's good. I think that if you really want to learn all about me, that first book is a great start. And then I would go to the other ones because the first one was more replete with serious transactional instruction. The others, one of them has three hundred and thirty-six case studies, the other one deals with the nine sticking points that keep most businesses from ever really achieving greatness. I've been very blessed because of the continual exposure to new and different and diverse industries to grow continually about every year or two. So yeah, it's very, very good. We have lots of resources that we freely contribute to people. If you want to review all the things, I'll give you a bunch of them to put on your own site.
Jay: I think there's more than, I think the first thing is to get your hands around the fact that strategy, marketing, positioning is and business model's going to be very key. Value creation is going to be inordinately important. Targeting the right market for the right reason, with the right proposition is critically important. Knowing how to express to them in verbiage that nobody else does, how you understand where they are, how you have an appreciation for what they want and how you have the ability uniquely and specifically to fulfill it, to address it, to resolve it, to achieve it, is very important and it requires you to get your head up, not just be looking down the mouth, but be really trying to think clearly about your strategy, your positioning and your marketing across the board.
Howard: If you go to your, your website is abraham.com. Your reviews are amazing. Everyone that reviews you is amazing, Tony Robbins says, Jay is a genius. He's a very, very special man. He's the one who taught me to fall in love with my customers, not my products and services. And it's just, it's so true. The secret to success is easy. If you work really hard and you really care about your customers, you seem to start getting lucky at that point.
Jay: Yeah and if you refer my website, and this is actually benevolent. We have a subsite called abraham.com/fifty shades. It's a joke on the fifty shades and make sure it's Abraham because there's a one for fifty shades, which I think is pornographic, but that's not mine. This one is just abraham.com/50 the numbers, shades, but it's got eight hundred hours of content. Nothing is sold, they're all full length. It's got eight hours on being preeminent, it's got eight or nine keynotes, it's got Tony Robbins and I answering questions, it's got four books that are no cost, that are all full length that are on it digitally. It's got two or three or four hundred question and answer sessions, it's got full courses, it's got.
Jay: We decided that the majority of people couldn't afford me privately, so if they couldn't afford me, I would be the benefactor to them because number one, they have other services that are more affordable. And secondly, if you can't pay me, I could at least invest in you because if I make you a more preeminent, more differentiated, more preemptive, more profitable, you're going to give back, you're going to refer me to lots of people and you're going to, it'll just come back. Speaking of that, I think there's a whole mini-course on how to get ninety-three different strategies for generating referrals on. It's all kinds of cool things that we have created over my body of work and my life and we feel like, I'm at a point in my life where it's really great to give back.
Howard: That is amazing what you just said. I hope they just caught all that abraham.com/50shades.
Jay: That's right. And it's just, really and truly we did it because Howard this was so frustrating to me because I created (unclear 0:12:51).
Howard: Oh, I get the play, it's 50 shades of Jay, instead of 50 Shades of Grey.
Jay: Yes, but you've got to be careful because if you just go to fifty shades, there's a bunch of, let's say, not as business-oriented offerings out there that I think would make a conservative dentist turn a little bit red, but mine is not that kind, mine just is loaded with wonderful resources and content that don't sell anything. You don't even have to opt in, by the way, we're pure contribution.
Howard: That is amazing. It's like Karma, what you put out, you'll get back
Jay: It is proven enormously enriching for two reasons. It's wonderful to be able to illuminate for people how they can use their time, their opportunity, their lives to add more value and be rewarded. We're rewarded in life financially for the value we create for others but a lot of people don't understand that value is interpreted and denominated far differently by the market, than what you might think, and you have to be focused on their definition and if you're not, you can be very frustrated and very low compensated.
Howard: Another endorsement you have on your website, Harvey MacKay says Jay is America's number one marketing wizard. When I was getting my MBA at ASU, he used to come in and guest lecture and he lives in Phoenix (unclear 0:14:25).
Jay: I know.
Howard: Great guy.
Jay: He's wonderful.
Howard: And then the next one is the late Stephen R. Covey, Jay Abraham is one of the greatest business and marketing minds I've ever known. And he just died. What? Last year? Falling off his mountain bike.
Jay: About a year and a half or two years, yeah. It was really tragic because he's in great shape. A wonderful man by the way, who had an ethical compass that was amazing and had goodness that was just incomparable, was a great mentor and friend of mine, so is his son Steven M. R., who's the worldwide authority on trust building.
Howard: You've also had the (unclear 0:15:07) review Daymond John, star of ABC's Shark Tank. Jay Is my mentor. I repeat what he says so that I make myself sound smarter. That Shark Tank that's really become a big television phenom hasn't it?
Jay: It has for three reasons. Number one, it's a great vehicle for looking at elements in business that almost every entrepreneur should focus on and doesn't. Number two, it's a great family. I've known Daymond and I've helped him for about eight years, but it's a great vehicle for you to sit down with your children and enjoyably absorb entrepreneurship and it's a great showcase of people's passion and what they value. It's quite interesting and it's fun, but it has a lot of subliminal value and I think it's a really interesting show and Daymond is a remarkably quality man. He's somebody that I couldn't say enough, but he's very gracious. I've helped a lot of prominent people and he's the one person that goes out of his way to acknowledge me. He's done elements about me in Forbes and Fortune and Inc., and he's a very nice man, a very good man and a very, very, rarity in a world where people are very covetous of everything so that they can be the heroes. Very interesting.
Howard: It's interesting you say that a family show because there's basically only two television shows that could get me and my four boys around the TV and that's the NFL or Shark Tank. And you're right, Shark Tank really is a family show and I never even thought of it that way, but it's absolutely true. In fact, every time I've ever ran into an NFL player, I've always thanked them for all those family time, something (unclear 0:17:08) all the boys.
Howard: The next one I want to focus on and I'll quit reading your endorsement, there's only like eight million of them. Brian Tracy, master sales trainer, Jay's innovative and dynamic approaches to increasing sales, cutting costs and boosting profits are the simplest, most powerful and practical I've ever seen. Here's the problem, Jay. Every dentist will tell you, well, I didn't go to school eight years to sell, I don't want to sell, they want to be. Dentists, when you take the physicians, 80% of them have never done a surgery. They listen to you, they run tests right, right. But dentists, a 100% of dentists do surgery all day long. We're in operatory and they want to do surgery with their hands and they value surgery, they study surgery, they're just surgeons. When you start saying, well, you need to, you can't do a $50,000 surgical case if you don't sell it.
Howard: So here's the stat I want you to think about. Between, the median average car sale in the United States is $33,500 and the average American will buy thirteen cars between the ages of sixteen and seventy-six. When you go into dentistry, 5% of the dentists sell that average new car case every single week. Every Friday they block off the whole day and they redo someone's mouth for about that neighborhood price. The other 95% of dentists have never done that one time in their entire career. Then when you go meet those people, you'll say, why can't you do that? They go, oh the economy, the insurance, the PPO's, Blue Cross and Blue Shield. It's everyone's fault and I'll say, well, there's eight guys in this building and Frank next door, he totally rebuilt someone's mouth and when you come into the car lot, they never tell you to go buy some used car, piece of junk. They take you to what they're most proud of, whether it's a (unclear 0:19:03) car, a Toyota or a Honda, or premium car. Dentists when they come in there, they look at a whole disaster and they just point to the worst tooth and they think, say, we should operate on this one first. How do you change their mindset from going from one tooth dentistry, thinking that all you care about is what Blue Cross and Blue Shield will pay. Instead of, there's no Blue Cross and Blue Shield when you go to buy a house or a car or an iPhone, but only 5% of dentists get that and.
Jay: I love the way you're denominating it. Well, let me give you a couple of perspectives because I think these might be very valuable. First of all, I don't believe in selling, I believe in being a trusted advisor and using leadership and trust to help people achieve what is in their best interest, not yours. That's all the work we did with the strategy of preeminence to teach people how to be the most trusted advisor. It starts by living that role, by basically committing yourself to sharing with them what you believe is in their best interest and not allowing them to purchase less than they should in less quantity, quality, consistency, combination, and frequency than they should because they will be deserved, not you and not allowing them to let themselves down. What I say is this, this is a great example. Can you see this?
Howard: I can.
Jay: It's a bottle of water, normally I'll do it with a half a bottle, but let's say that I own Jay Abraham's Bottled Water Shop and Water Bar, excuse me, Howard. And you came in and threw money on the table and said, I want to buy, let's presume this was half full, a half a bottle of water and I took your money without first making sure you knew that your body needed seven and a half more of these every day for your brain chemistry to work, for your mind to operate at peak, for your stress level to be low, for you to be the best grounded, for you to be, have the most energy, for you to have your cellular structure work. If I did that and I did everything in my power to make sure you knew it and encourage you because I know your body, your brain, your relationships, your performance will be disserved without it and you decided not to, then I'm okay. If you came every other day and bought eight and I'll let you do it and took your money without doing the same thing, without advising you that that's well and good, but you've got to get the other eight, if you don't get them from me, get it somewhere because this is a pyrrhic victory, that I am disserving you.
Jay: When you are preeminent, you have a moral responsibility, you have an obligation to communicate and advise what's in their best interest and if you think having a dysfunctional mouth and they're not at the end of their life, a unappealing mouth and they're in any kind of a role where self-esteem or impact is, no pun intended, is on others is relevant and you just take what you are able to get. That's selling out on your moral responsibility and that's not being preeminent, it's being basically, I don't even know what the right word is. So that's one thing.
Jay: Secondly, I don't believe you ever, there's a study that said, most people are trying to figure out what do I have to say and do to get someone to buy from me or buy more. It's not that, it's how much value, how much more value do you have to create that they appreciate. Value starts with caring enough about their betterment that you don't allow them to consciously be unaware or accept either mediocrity or flawed aspects of their life, that if corrected can multiply the quality, the success, the self-esteem, the career, the relationship. If you allow them to be what they have defaulted to, without going out of your way to show them there's a better way and it can be affordable and it's going to transform their life and they should be aware of it and if they don't want it, it's okay. But you want them to have the best life. It's about what you want for them, not you want from them to give you if that makes sense.
Howard: Absolutely. Botox doesn't inject botulinum toxin. It injects self-esteem and confidence.
Jay: Exactly right. It gives you a feeling of vitality, virility, attractiveness, and that translates to confidence, that translates to charisma, it translates to more joyous life. Again, you have to understand the game you're playing, the game you're playing is not, I want to make a lot of money. The game you're playing is, I will be outrageously rewarded because I will add more value to society or my market than anyone else because I care more than anyone else and I'm going to fall in love with my patients, not just dentistry or cosmetic dentistry or implant surgery. I'm going to fall in love with what I can do to transform lives, to transform lives.
Howard: But it's so bizarre. We're talking 95% of the dentists will go from age twenty-five to sixty-five doing surgery five days a week and never deliver a new car and 5% will do it every week. It's like if you wrecked your car and took it in there, they would just get out, duct tape and WD-40...
Jay: I love your metaphors
Howard: ...and just try to fix you up and patch you up until you can get back home and one out of twenty, they don't even care about insurance, they're just like, even in the poor towns. I was (unclear 0:25:47) to lunch. I was visiting mom back in Kansas couple of weeks ago, she turns eighty this summer and I was having lunch with a dentist in a small town in Kansas and he's saying, yeah, you don't understand. You're not out there and we're not out in rich California and Beverly Hills and Key Biscayne, Florida or Manhattan. We're out here in the middle of nowhere, Kansas and they're all a bunch of small grain wheat farmers. And you could see outside the Mexican restaurant, you could see a 7-11, and I said, how many trucks are in that parking lot? And he counted and he goes seven. Every one of them was an F-150 to an F-250. Every one of them was $40,000 to $90,000. And I go, why do all these poor farmers have enough money for a $90,000 truck and yet if they bring in their mouth, as you, I love the way you call the mouth, just dysfunctional, unappealing, filled with disease. Why can't you just present the whole case?
Howard: So my next question succinctly was, people like you, is that born or is that, can that be taught, like leadership? Are you just born a leader, are you born a salesman, are you a born a communicator or is this a skill? Because dentists and physicians and lawyers, the reason they're so dysfunctional is the only way you can get into Dental School or Medical School, is you've got to get straight A's in calculus, physics, chemistry, biology. So in undergrad, we lived in the library, that's all we did and we aced all that stuff and all the normal people were in fraternities drinking alcohol, chasing women. So this natural selection is a bunch of people who lived in the basement of the library for four years and now they're doctors. So it's like, can you work with that? Can you train that?
Jay: Sure, let me give you, I'm going to give you three responses. It could take a little bit of time, but they're very profound, then I'm going to give you an exercise that I would be happy to do with you that would blow people's minds. It can't be done today, but it could be done at another session.
Jay: So first of all, I studied very hard for a while, the concept of greatness. I believe that every human being unless they have some malady, mental illness or something, are programmed in their DNA to want greatness, not just greatness in terms of their career or profession, but greatness as a human being. Greatness as a man, a woman, a father, a mother, a husband, lover, a parent, whatever, and yet about 2 or 3 or 5% ever achieve that. Now you've got to ask why the delta? Well, I have a number of reasons.
Jay: First of all, most people have no idea what greatness looks like, what it feels like, what it manifests like, what it is received like, so they don't know what to do. Now, greatness transcends all these categories. So if you don't know what it looks like, what it's supposed to feel like, what you're supposed to do, and you have no one to teach you, then you're just going blind. First thing I tell people to do is think in your life of the people that you trust implicitly and what they do and how they conduct themselves and how they make you feel and what they say and their mannerisms or their eye contact or they're or their comforting gestures and reflect on that and compare it to you.
Jay: I normally get people to look at five or six categories, their business, their relationship, their health and figure out first of all, what's greatness relative to them would look like vis-a-vis, where they are. I believe in what I called the logjam theory, that you can't be great in business if the rest of your life is totally screwed up. So you have to find the one thing first and foremost, that if fixed and if elevated and if liberated and emancipated is going to let everything else flow.
Jay: But again, first thing is figure out what greatness looks like in each of these areas, then figure out where you stand on that scale. Next is identify the safest, not the fastest, but the safest paths to get there and you can't do that if you don't think and look outside and question people and study. Then start very slowly pursuing it, in all of these categories, but start with the one that's going to be the most liberating to everything else. But here's what goes wrong, Howard. Everybody or most people on this line probably have children or they certainly know people who've had children. You got four, I have seven and if you think about when they started to walk, talk, speak, poop, ride a bike, they were terrible. The only way that they managed is because you as a parent and your spouse or significant other encouraged them, championed them, put them back on the horse, told them how great it was when they talked and said (unclear 0:31:25) or when the ate and they put the spoon of oatmeal in their eye or when they dumped a little poopy right next to the bathroom door. And most of us don't have somebody to be our champion, our mentor, our advocate, our accountability person and I'm not even advocating you go out and pay somebody, but I'm saying the first time you do something, it's going to be so imperfect. You're going to want to immediately default back to status quo and that's when you have to break through. If you can do that and you can understand the, or the, it's called the delta in all these different areas of your life and systematically improve them and realize that you didn't get to where you are in one day. So you have the ability to progressively get to where you want to be through a system of safe steps. When you do that, it makes life a lot more exciting and I can promise you I've done this and I'm not suggesting to do it for your colleagues. I'm just saying that that's one way to do it. Now, let me give you this exercise. So besides working with three hundred plus experts, none of which came to me for help with their expertise, their expertise excuse me, or methodology they came to get their methodology perceived higher, denominated, compared, demonstrated to be superior, to get their brand and their value more dimensionally established. I had to learn a compression course on what they were and so I got a great knowledge base. One of the people that I worked with early was the Deming organization, if they're old enough to know that Deming was the father of process improvement, optimization, highest and best use. It was mostly focused on throughput manufacturing but has total translatability to revenue generation and management but what I found was when you study multiple people who excel dramatically higher than their counterparts in different functions, and you interview them on what they do, how they do it, why they do it, going even back in time to what motivated them to do it and get them to realize, a lot of them don't even know how and why they do it. When you do this kind of a forensic discovery, all these wonderful insights and understandings come out and if you've got twenty or forty of your colleagues who are doing those weekly, thirty and $40,000 transactions and you got them together and you and I interviewed them on mindset, on methodology, on belief system, on process. I think the outcome would blow the 95% of the ones that don't understand it's mind because it's pure confirmation and you'll hear a lot of different ways of approaching this. And I think it would be very, very exciting and that would be a great interview for you to have.
Howard: It would be.
Jay: I would encourage you, I'd be happy to do it with you because I would like to discover what, and it's usually going to be different. They don't all have the same belief system, but when you get twenty, thirty, forty of these people to share, not just what they do, why they do it, how they do it, what drove them. Maybe their father told them, look, or their mother, don't ever allow anyone to suffer. Don't ever allow anyone to have less a life than they're entitled or something like that. And when you hear this poignantly and it's wonderful because if they've never thought about it, the people you're interviewing, who are doing it, it comes out so naturally and passionately and poignantly and authentically that your 95% cannot help but be impacted, no pun intended, positively. And then you ask these people what would be the lesson? What would you tell somebody who doesn't do it now that you understand yourself to do first, second, third, and then you redo it after going individually and you do it all together. Then you go through a panel and you ask the same question of a bunch of them, the same question and I've done this for a lot of people and it is extraordinary. And then if you got that document Howard, and then you transcribed it and you made it a gift or something that you made available with one of your other products or services, I think it would be invaluable to help break through the glass ceiling. And I'll give you another thought that's very powerful. Most people in business struggle with the wrong silent question, they're tormented by constantly saying, am I worthy of trying to do this? Am I worthy of trying to sell a $30,000? I don't know, I don't think I've ever done it and I don't know if I can do it, I don't feel like I'm very confident at it, I don't know that I believe in it. It's the wrong question. When you realize how much more is possible with the right ideology, with the right intention, with the right outcome focus, then the right question to ask is not are you worthy of this goal, but is the goal worthy of you because there's so much more you should be and could be doing to enrich the people that you have interaction, I don't know if that makes sense.
Howard: It does, it makes a lot of sense. In 1900, healthcare was 1% of the GDP, by 2000 it was 14%. Now we're at 2018 and 17%, which roughly means seventeen cents of every dollar spent in America is on healthcare. The one million physicians and the two hundred thousand dentists own all the power, yet they live in fear of Medicaid, Medicare or the insurance companies. Medscape just released, just published yesterday that of all the professions, medicine now has the highest suicide rate and because doctors feel like they want to treat, they would be treating their own child this way, but they're forced to treat all the other children other ways. They don't have time, ten-minute appointments, they don't get a, it's. But what I don't understand, do you think dentists and physicians are afraid of success? Do you think they're afraid of failure? What are they afraid of? They're the, if the doctors all just said we're not going to work. Well, what is Blue Cross and Blue Shield going to do?
Jay: Yeah, I agree.
Howard: What is Medicaid going to do?
Jay: (unclear 0:38:42).
Howard: They have all fifty-two cards of the deck.
Jay: Yeah, and that's, but (unclear 0:38:47) actually, I'm enjoying the interview more than you are because I'm enjoying, you're very passionate and very logical and very metaphor-rich perspectives. But I've helped so many people who did only elective cash services and I think that (unclear 0:39:11) here's my belief in life. 2% of what happens to everyone are the equivalent of acts of God, you can't control it. 98% are the result of either decisions you make or don't make, actions you take or don't take, factors, forces, and elements that are immutable in life that you either harness and control or let control you. So the first thing is if your child came in and said, I can't do math, it just, I don't understand it. Would you say, okay, then don't do it? Or would you help them understand it and try to master it or at least overcome it? What you're saying to me is so many of these dentists will say, I can't do it, so they're just not and yet there's hypocrisy of sort, if you're in one side of your mouth saying, I really want this practice to be more, not just successful financially, but most people don't realize what you really want is equally as much gratification, as much satisfaction, as much fulfillment, and that comes from knowing you're in control and knowing you are transforming more lives and not just doing interim prophylactic type things. And I think that's the first thing. As far as suicide, I think suicide comes from erroneously perceiving that you have no control of your environment and feeling like you're destined to ten minute this and you're destined to whatever reimbursement you can get or you're destined to have to negotiate down or you're destined to only do basic whatever functions and that is an erroneous perception of your limited paradigm of not just understanding but of belief in yourself. The ideology has to change and your ideology should change because you are disserving people by not shifting, you are disserving yourself and your mental health by not allowing yourself to fulfill your purpose, which is to transform lives, it's not just to fill cavities and pull teeth. You're disserving your ability to enrich and grow your team and have them on a crusade and a mission that's beyond just the technical function that their job title is and you're disserving yourself. Most people I work with privately, we try to identify the mission, the crusade and every day we come to work saying how many more lives or businesses or families are we going to transform today? And you can't think transformatically if you're just doing tactical things. Does that make sense?
Howard: Absolutely. You ought to have a program just for dentists. We should do a program just for dental.
Jay: I would love to. Over my career, Howard, I have done a lot of group programs that were very modest per person because we could deliver them with (unclear 0:42:42) scale and we went everything from transactional, strategic, tactical and it was, a lot of it was philosophical, ideological, methodological. But I think that if you don't change your belief system about yourself and your purpose, and you don't really understand that you are disserving everybody by not really helping people be the very best they can or at least helping them appreciate that they could be, they should be and that, and you also and here's a other thing. If everybody realized what it would mean in their lives, in their self-esteem, in their career growth, in their romantic life, in their interaction with every other human being, then they would do it. But they understand fragments and they understand the outer periphery of the value. You have the responsibility and the opportunity of doing what, in NLP they would call future pacing. Taking me into the future and helping me appreciate how transformative my life will be, not can be, but will be when this, when these procedures, when these, whatever you call them, when these, I guess (unclear 0:44:17) procedures are done and you want me to know that from this day forward, every day I can wake up happier, every day I can go out more confident, every day I can evoke more joy because I will be, every day I can feel better and even my spouse will look at me different. I remember, I've been married a couple of times, but just when I lost weight, my former spouse thought I was much more attractive. But you got all these wonderful things that will, are tangible and intangible, but I don't think the patient really appreciates it and they don't appreciate that the rest of their life is a long time and the ROI that they deserve both tangible and intangible because it will, you don't want to be discriminatory, but it will help their career, it will help their relationships, it will help the way they come across, it will help their confidence, it will help their certainty, it will help their impact. And to not have them aware of that and look at ROI, you're forty-five with luck, you're going to live to be eighty-five. You got forty more years, forty years of basically being self-conscious, forty years of being deep down unhappy, forty years of struggling with and letting that disappointment permeate your career, your relationship or you want forty years of an exquisite joy, forty years of wonderful confidence, forty years of unimaginable connectivity.
Howard: When we poll the dentist, since 1998 and we poll them. What is the number one stress in your life? It's their employees. They, again, they were groomed to be mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, and they want to do surgery full time and now they've got these people and, and it just kills them. You watch a dentist after they get done doing a root canal or placing an implant or whatever, soon as they're done, they run right back to their private office and shut the door. And it's like the inmates took over the asylum and the warden is locked in the room within his private office. How do you, again, is that true?
Jay: Yeah no. I'm laughing because you're criticizing an environment you created. So let me give you a couple perspectives. Going back to my strategy of preeminence. It is predicated on falling in love with your clients and clients. Actually, if you look into the definition of a client, it exceeds a patient. A client is somebody under the care, the protection, the wellbeing, but you have three categories. First are the ones that pay you, the others are the ones you pay, meaning your team members, employees, and your vendors. You have to step back and look at reality, and most people don't try to appreciate, understand, examine, and acknowledge how everyone else sees life. The dentist, he or she Is consumed with themselves. with their frustration, with their unmet goals, with their stresses. They don't understand that every adult human being in their employee is hitching their wagon to that dentist's star. They're looking for their security, for their fulfillment, for their purpose in that relationship. And if the dentist doesn't lead and then gets hypocritically angry because there is no cohesive mission, there's no great purpose, there's no collaborative alignment. The dentist isn't trying to help grow and develop the abilities of the team members and not just the professional, but in a multitude of ways, interaction, human, charisma. There's all these soft-skills Howard, that there's studies we were talking about Stephen Covey and his son. He's done outrageous research on trust building and most people think they have great trust, but trust is denominated. He's found thirteen denominators and he studied the companies and individuals that command outrageous optimal trust and their performance is 300% better than everybody else's, their teams or 300% more collaborative. When people are on a unified mission and everybody feels like they're a part of the outcome and that in some modest way they've helped the patient gain this outcome. They're much more inspired when you're investing in training and developing the person, not just in their dental support skills, but in everything from being fascinating, from being focussed, from time management, from communication skills, from things that helped them in their lives, then you're great. A lot of people could say, I can't hire great people and I say, BS. You either won't hire the best and cry only once or you won't hire people who are growable and developable and grow them, or you hire those people and you allow them to lie fallow as far as not nourishing their spirit and their body and their sense of purpose and you get mad at them. Everybody wants the same thing, what makes a dentist think he or she is any different? Do think that person down there doesn't have hopes and dreams and fears and stresses and health and weight and financial issues. Do you think they aren't self-conscious about things? Do you really think they're that irrelevant and you're all that important? It's really a reframing of your values and your sense of purpose, the leader, leadership and empathic contribution should be the denominator of that dentist to his or her team. Any complaints they make that are even partially attributed to their conduct, don't count because you can't be a halfway leader. You got say, let's go, come on, follow me over the whatever, and then say, oh, I think I'll stop halfway and then say, these guys didn't follow it. Oh, come on, look at me, a lot of people don't have the ability of what I'll call reality-based critical thinking. (unclear 0:51:56) ability to look at what's really going on and judge it accordingly. And when you do, you have no right to be depressed, you have no right to be suicidal, you have no right to be envious, you have no right to feel substandard, you have no right to feel like your life is destined to mediocrity. You have every right to transform that in a heartbeat, if you so want.
Howard: It's, and then last, you're too kind to be giving me an hour of your life. I can't believe that you're doing this. One last question or subject I want, to take on before because (unclear 0:52:40). It's still a taboo to talk about money. Dentists will tell you, what would you think if you're taking your kid to the hospital and you're hear the emergency room physician talking about business and overhead and prices and incomes. Talking about business and dentistry.
Jay: I'm sorry, I have a helicopter out here.
Howard: Oh, it's okay. Even churches think the televangelists on TV are embarrassing because they're talking about contributions and money, religion, healthcare. They just don't like to talk about money. it's taboo. Everybody knows that that money has to come in, we got to pay the bills. They still, if you ask a doctor, well, how much will that cost? Well, let me bring Shirley back here as Shirley's the evil woman who will talk about the evil subject. They can't even look you in the eye and say, we could do the whole thing for $30,000. So how do you change a culture and it's actually the easiest in America, it's absolutely obscenities in Asia, in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong...
Jay: Yeah, I know.
Howard: ...if a doctor advertises, they would take his license away from Hong Kong To Romania. But how do you change a culture that thinks that that's just kind of gross to talk about money and surgery?
Jay: Well, first of all, it starts with a really interesting, and I'm sorry, I'm right on the banks of a local airport and (unclear 0:54:18) the largest helicopter manufacturer and they test their helicopters right when I do interviews. I'll give you a couple of partying answers. the first one is, it's semantics. It's how you look at it, and I'll get into that in a minute. Probably more importantly, if you can't respect your value, then why would you expect anyone else to. Think about it. If you don't have pride and certainty about your value and its worth and its impact, then how could you expect your client to. If you're the leader, it's fine if your system h. A third party do it, but you should be very confident not avoiding it because I think that does connote embarrassment. Anytime you say, well, I'll have somebody else take care of it. What you're saying is I overprice and I'm embarrassed to even tell you. And that's so dumb. I think if you can see the outrageously inordinate value that is created for that patient by what you do cosmetically and you can't have enormous unfettered and unrestricted pride in celebrating that, you got to realign your belief system, don't you think?
Howard: Absolutely. So where should my homies go next? What's the next step for all the dentists listening to you today? What would be the next step? You were saying, if you go to abraham.com, one of the top buttons...
Jay: Go to the 50 shades. Here's what you do Howard...
Howard: ...(unclear 0:56:12) resources...
Jay: ...go there, the abraham.com/50shades. The first thing I would study is the strategy of preeminence, we have eight hours on it. We have general stuff, we have audio, we have video, we have me applying it to two industries and it will reset your belief system and elevate your aspirational level and connect you to a higher purpose that deserves to be enriched because of the level of contribution. Then read any of the books that are up there in the order. There's a couple, the last one, the CEO book is more sophisticated but it basically is very insightful on things like not just IQ, EQ and your ability to really collaborate with people. Read Getting Everything because it's a fun read and it's got three hundred and thirty-six examples. Watch me do keynotes because there's about a multitude of keynotes. Look at all the interviews I've done, there's multiple interviews I've done with, on everything from how to hire and motivate Millennials to very complex issues. And I would love if you think, see if there's enough response and if there is, I would love to collaborate with you and create a very impactful process to help a lot of people and whether we did that or not, if you'd allow me, if you could source two dozen or more colleagues who do these all the time, the 30,000, and they would be amenable to letting me socratically interview them in a group setting by phone if it's easier, by whatever form. I think that would be one of the most outrageously valuable services you could do and the greatest reason they should want to do it is by listening to their counterparts who will have different strategies, different motivations, they themselves will learn elements they can weave into their own approach and it might multiply the number of $30,000 deals they do.
Howard: Sounds fun. Again, it was just a huge honor that you would come on the show today and talk to a bunch of dentists.
Jay: You delighted me. I love your knowledge and your analogies, your statistics. To me, the greatest tragedy is a life that's not a fully lived. To me, that is probably the greatest disservice you do to yourself and all the others you could impact. One of the things that I learned is that every day you have a responsibility with everybody you interact with to make their life better off because you were in it and better off doesn't mean just smiling, although it does. If you know that you're letting somebody out of that chair who could have the next forty years of their life, be extraordinary instead of, not just ordinary, you're disserving them. And when you get the strategy of preeminence inculcated, it elevates the whole strata that you operate. You're happier, you're more dynamic, you're more passionate, you're more connective. You have an aura that is indescribable and it's contagious. And I encourage if nothing else, do that. If nothing else, if you do what I said and you put some people together, I would be so privileged to guide you on that. Also, if I show you how to do it and demonstrate it, you can do that on any category you want. Who's better at collecting money? Who's better at hiring people, who's better at having high performing? And you can do it and you can create five or seven or ten different segments on that.
Howard: You can follow him on Twitter. We just sent out a tweet. You're Twitter following is @realjayabraham and Ryan just sent out a tweet. Also, one last final question. You were born in Indianapolis, home of the Indy 500 and you just got back from the big derby. Which one's your favorite sport? Is it the Indy 500? Or is it racing horses?
Jay: I don't like betting, but I must tell you, I was very privileged, I had a client, we made an outrageous growth for and he rewarded us by taking my wife and I and letting us, getting us seats in what's called millionaire row, which is a really cool place. It's indoors and it's very upscale and I have never seen as amazing a display of fashionability and wild hats and men having outrageous custom suits. I'm a people watcher. I love to explore and observe people and their, how they express themself in words and styles and hair, in clothes. It was outrageous. It was really amazing. But I would say that you drink too much, you eat too much and you bet too much. But as far as visual splendor and amazement, it was incomparable. It was great. Thank you for asking. I only hope that this discussion added some value because it's very important to me and I have to mind myself, I don't want to just babble on and normally I'd talk about very specific business building elements, but I think the direction you took it was probably far more purposeful and valuable for your colleagues. But I hope that it was and I hope that I added a dimension of perspective that is not normally addressed in these kinds of interviews.
Howard: Nice. Ryan, what horse race did we go to last week? Keeneland in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ryan: That was Lexington.
Howard: Lexington, Kentucky, and my (unclear 01:02:30).
Jay: I hear that's beautiful.
Howard: Well, again, what you touched on the most, what I enjoyed the most (unclear 01:02:36) it's the number one place you'll see women flaunt their hats. It's all about the hat. I love those big hats, those women wore...
Jay: And they're gorgeous...
Howard: ...in the twentites...
Jay: ...and most of them...
Howard: ...oh my God.
Jay: ...are custom made and I got to honestly say they're outrageously attractive, on the right woman. Some of them are silly, but the majority of them were magnificent. I was literally incredulous at how, I love creative expression. I own a lot of big sculptures and a lot of diverse art and a lot of unusual cars because I love to see how creative expression really manifests itself in different forms. That was just magnificent.
Howard: So if you're a man that likes to see the ladies in big hats, you got to hit those horse races in the south, they're trully magnificent. Jay Abraham, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope you have a rocking hot day.
Jay: Thank you, Howard and what a privilege to be on and you are very impressive.
Howard: Oh, thank you and thank you Ryan.