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Exponential Entrepreneurs

The 97  ›  Assessment and reflection

The Sticking Points: Solution

The point

We identified what I thought were the nine biggest ways most businesses get stuck and how to get unstuck. And you can be successfully stuck.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 1, Session 3: Perry Marshall Quadrants Cued to 21:32 14 min 41 sec loading…

Why it matters

Revenue looks fine. The doors stay open. Payroll clears. And the growth you are truly capable of never arrives, year after year, and nothing in your numbers ever says so. Most businesses are only partially stuck. Many are successfully stuck, and that is the most expensive kind there is. A struggling business knows it is struggling. A successful one rarely notices the day it stopped growing, because success is the anesthetic.

Jay named these nine in the 2008 meltdown, out of four decades of turning businesses around, because the same nine places kept limiting owners. Losing out to the competition. Not selling enough. Erratic business volume. Failing to strategize. Costs eating your profits. Still doing what isn't working. Marginalized by the marketplace. Mediocre marketing. Still saying 'I can do it myself.' Read them slowly. One of them just made you wince.

You have not built growth thinking into everything you do. You do not measure, monitor, compare or quantify results. You are not running a detailed, strategic marketing plan with specific growth expectations. Those three produce all nine, and fixing any one of them frees the sticking point it was creating. Somewhere in your business one gear has seized: poor leadership, a weak business model, a market too small, a me-too product, thin distribution.

Free that one and everything downstream turns with it; the gains multiply against each other instead of adding, which is the geometric leverage inside 10×10×10. Play to your absolute exponential strategic advantage, not your disadvantage.

The mistake almost everyone makes

You will read the nine, wince at one, then go to work on a different one, the one you already know how to fix. The wince is the diagnosis. The one you can fix cheaply is rarely the one costing you most.

The test: Name the one you winced at and the one you actually plan to work on. If they differ, the gap is the diagnosis, and the money sits with the wince.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

WhoWhat happened
Footprints FloorsRan flooring installation with no showroom, no inventory and subcontracted crews, and systemwide sales rose 42.8 percent to $40 million in 2022.
InPostReplaced the doorstep with self-service lockers at a fraction of courier cost: 744.9 million parcels in 2022 across more than 20,000 lockers.
Mount Saint Bernard AbbeySold the dairy herd when milk stopped paying and spent five years building a brewery that can produce about 300,000 bottles a year.
Reliance, Inc.Takes the small, fast metal orders the mills refuse: $14.3 billion of sales from orders averaging $3,120, 40% of them delivered within 24 hours.
SOUK FarmsThis Rwandan grower spends more than $50,000 a year on certifications and waits two to three years to reach a European retailer's shelf.
Year UpEmployers cover about $16,000 of the $28,000 per-participant cost, and a national randomized trial found earnings rose 30 to 40 percent a year.
ZZZ Bears (Justin Baum)Won shelf space at Target, then shelved retail entirely to sell military-uniform teddy bears online, reaching $35,000 a month with no employees.
geobra Brandstätter (Playmobil)Met the 1973 oil crisis, plastic suddenly costly, with a tiny figure using almost no material: 3 million Deutschmarks in its first year.

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.

  • Successfully stuck“We had a good year, and I could not tell you one thing this business does better now than it did three years ago.”Names the most expensive kind of stuck, successful and unmeasured, and hands you the nine places it hides, so a good year stops covering for a stalled one.
  • Erratic business volume“March was excellent, April was dead, and nobody here can tell me why either of them happened.”Puts erratic volume among the nine sticking points and traces it back to the missing detailed marketing plan with specific growth expectations underneath it.
  • Costs eating the profits“We are busier than we have ever been and there is less money left at the end of the month.”Sends you to the one gear that has seized instead of an across-the-board cut, the way Footprints Floors ran flooring installation with no showroom and no inventory at all.
  • Still doing what isn't working“We have run the same promotion every spring for six years and I have never checked what it actually returns.”Makes measuring, monitoring, comparing and quantifying the cause rather than the chore, so what stopped paying gets found before you fund another year of it.
  • Doing it all myself“Everything important still comes through me, and I am the reason half of it is late.”Names saying 'I can do it myself' as one of the nine, and shows what freeing it compounds into: gains multiplying against each other rather than one more improvement.
  • The client who cannot see the stall“My client is profitable, so nothing I say about growth lands, and every plan I write gets thanked and shelved.”Hands you nine plain sentences a profitable owner recognizes on sight, so the diagnosis arrives from the owner's own wince rather than from your slide.

The challenge

Free the one gear that has seized

Read the nine out loud and write down the one that made you wince. Write what it cost last quarter in dollars, from your records. Ask whoever knows your numbers best which of the nine they would name. Write theirs beside yours. Then name which of the three conditions produces it: growth thinking not built in, results not measured, or no plan carrying growth expectations. Run that condition's move in the next seven days: a growth expectation on one activity, a measurement on one number, or dates and figures on one page of plan.

How you will know it is done One page: the sticking point you named, its dollar figure, the answer you were given, the condition beneath it, and the move you ran.

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 named the one sticking point that made you wince, and written it down.
What it multiplies Measuring, monitoring and comparing what you have never quantified, so the gear that seized while revenue looked fine shows up as a number every single week.
The trap Making the successfully stuck business even more comfortably stuck. Revenue rises, the doors stay open, and every one of the nine places growth leaks from is now leaking at machine speed. Success was already the anesthetic. This doubles the dose.