Modeling for Millions, Borrowing From Billions

The point

Modeling for Millions: copy from the best, learn the strategies that work. Borrowing from Billions: tapping into the brilliance of billion dollar ideas and minds.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 1 Cued to 1:24:21 1 min 54 sec loading…

Why it matters

True breakthroughs and durable competitive advantage come from outside your industry, almost never from inside it. That is not a slogan; it is what forty years across thousands of industries looks like. The reason it transfers is that no two businesses are ever the same and the principles underneath them always are. Find the principle underneath a proven success, adapt it to your own market, and it does the same work for you it did for them. I call it the geometry of business: a proven strategy is a shape you can move. There is an altitude above that, and it is faster. Modeling takes the shape and rebuilds it yourself. Borrowing takes the thing itself and skips the build. Somebody with a budget you will never have has already built the platform, opened the channel, tested the creative at volume, bought the market data and paid for the research, and it is there for you to help yourself to. The examples are everywhere. The assembly line came out of meatpacking. Loyalty programmes came out of the airlines. The drive-through came out of banking. The modern hospital experience came out of hospitality. Phil Knight borrowed a waffle iron from his own kitchen to press the first sole. And keep going, because a single borrowed breakthrough is an advantage while a dozen of them, stacked, compound on each other — you are not adding improvements one at a time, you are multiplying against what is already working.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Studying only your own industry, and calling it competitive research. Your competitors are reading the same trade press, attending the same conferences and copying each other. Everything genuinely new to your market is already ordinary somewhere else.

The test: Name the last idea you brought into this business from an industry that is nothing like yours. If you cannot, every idea you have is one your competitors also have.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Nike	Phil Knight borrowed a waffle iron out of his own kitchen to press the first sole, and that is the whole idea in one object.
A publishing protégé	Took book-club economics, applied them to newsletters, and grew the company from eight million dollars to over a billion in five years.
LEGO	Borrowed narratives it had not built — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel — and the licensed themes helped pull it out of its crisis.
GoDaddy	Borrowed the loss-leader ladder, turning a cheap domain into the entry point for hosting, email, websites, payments and security.
The Beverly Hills diamond companies	Two men, identical thirty-nine-dollar stones. The one who borrowed after-sale upgrade economics netted over twenty-five million in his first year.
Hulu	Rivals borrowed each other's content into a platform none could have built alone, and it reached a valuation near $27.5 billion.
Blendtec	Borrowed the demonstration format from another century, blended an iPhone into dust on camera, and sales reportedly rose 700%.
Hotel Towel-Reuse Researchers	Tested a sign saying most previous guests in that very room had reused their towels, and it beat the environmental appeal at no added cost.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

We only study our own industry“Everything we read, attend and benchmark against comes from people who do exactly what we do.”Three industries unlike yours read deliberately, for the moves that are ordinary there and unheard of where you are.
Nothing new has come from inside“Our last genuinely different idea was years ago, and everything since has been a variation on it.”A supply of proven breakthroughs somebody else already paid to validate, which is where genuinely new ideas actually come from.
We think our industry is special“Whenever somebody suggests something from elsewhere, the answer in this room is that our industry does not work like that.”The principle underneath a borrowed move, which transfers even when the surface of the two businesses shares nothing at all.
We pay to learn what someone already proved“We tend to work things out ourselves, slowly and expensively, and I suspect somebody solved it years ago.”The failures you get to skip, because somebody with a far larger budget has already paid for them and published the result.
We copy competitors and stay level“We watch two competitors closely and match them, and none of the three of us is going anywhere.”The reason matching a competitor cannot move you — you are both reading the same sources — and where to read instead.
The advisor's version“My value is supposed to be what I have seen elsewhere, and I mostly work inside one industry.”A deliberate cross-industry reading habit, so what you have seen elsewhere keeps being worth what a client is paying you for.

The challenge

Borrow one move from an industry unlike yours.

Pick three industries that have nothing to do with yours. For each, name the move that makes them money and could not be done in your business. Now strip each to the principle underneath and ask what it would look like in your market, with your clients. One of the three will be uncomfortable and workable at the same time. That is the one. Then name one platform, channel or published study a far larger company already paid to build, and one way to use it this quarter without building anything.

How you will know it is done Three industries named, three moves stripped to their principle, one written out for your business, and something a bigger company built put to work.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have already borrowed one move from an industry unlike yours, and run it here.

What it multiplies Reading across industries you have never worked in, stripping each proven move down to the principle underneath, and telling you which survive translation into your market.

The trap Industry best practice, returned at speed. Asked about your market it hands back the median of your own trade press, the same consensus your competitors are reading, and you have automated exactly the research that keeps everyone in your market copying each other.