Power Pivots

The point

Power pivots are things that take a little bit of shift but produce a huge upside: small change, big result. You can change your marketing a little bit and change your results a big bit.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 1, Session 2 Cued to 45:40 10 min 13 sec loading…

Why it matters

Business has always rewarded speed, strength and scale, and those three no longer decide who wins. Technology hands your rival the resources that used to set you apart. Globalization levels the field. Capital is abundant. The advantage you spent four years building is copied in one — and the only edge left that cannot be copied at that speed is the ability to turn.

There are fifteen places a business can turn, and I want you to see the whole field before you commit to any of them. How you make money: the business model, the product and service portfolio, research and development, the supply chain, Preeminence. Who you serve and how you speak: target-market refocusing, positioning, marketing, branding and messaging, search visibility. How you reach and grow: social media, competitive intelligence, lead generation, partnering and joint-venture alliances, lifetime-value expansion.

Here is the part almost everybody misses. A pivot redeploys what you already own. Same buyers, same reputation, same infrastructure, new heading — and the difference between a mediocre outcome and an epic one is not linear, it is asymmetric. Enterprise did not invent a new kind of car to grow from seven vehicles into a thirty-eight-billion-dollar business. It changed where the rental happened.

You do not need all fifteen. You need to find the place your business has quietly stopped turning.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Hearing the word pivot and thinking start again. Owners either refuse to turn because they believe it means abandoning what they built, or they turn and abandon it — walking away from the buyers and the reputation that made the new heading reachable.

The test: Name what carries over. If the answer is nothing — not the buyers, not the reputation, not the infrastructure — you are not pivoting, you are starting a second company.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Tupperware	Brownie Wise moved the sale off the shop shelf into the home party, where the product could actually be demonstrated.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car	Built neighbourhood branches for people whose cars were in the shop. Seven cars became more than thirty-eight billion in annual revenue.
Xerox	Leased the 914 and charged by usage rather than selling it, turning a frightening purchase into a low-risk trial.
The Porsche dealership buyer	Used an overlooked demo-car rule to sell drive-a-new-Porsche-every-year memberships at $75,000, raising about $2 million before owning the asset.
Proactiv	Because acne recurs, it sold a regimen on continuity rather than a one-time box. Because the problem recurred, the revenue recurred.
Snickers	Reframed the bar as the cure for hunger with You're not you when you're hungry. Reportedly 15.9% global sales growth, product unchanged.
Priceline	Bought Booking.com for about $133 million, adopted its agency model, and went from losses to over a billion in profit.
Entrepreneur Magazine	Repackaged nearly a hundred archived, still-timely business-opportunity reports into start-up manuals and themed collections, generating roughly nine million dollars in back-end sales.

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 are stuck and the only idea is start over“Growth has flattened and the only options anyone puts on the table involve blowing the whole thing up.”Fifteen named places to turn without abandoning the buyers, the reputation or the infrastructure you have already paid for.
The market changed and we did not“The way our customers buy has moved and we are still selling the way we sold five years ago.”A change of heading rather than a change of vessel, chosen from the fifteen and costed before you commit to it.
Everything we build gets copied“By the time an advantage of ours is working properly, three competitors have it too.”The one edge that cannot be copied at speed — the ability to turn — and where in your business it has quietly seized up.
One model one price one kind of client“We show the same face at the same price to the same sort of buyer, and we turn the rest away.”The positioning pivot: the same expertise framed for the premium client and the value client at once, so you keep the ones you used to decline.
We pivoted and it cost us everything“We tried changing direction once and it nearly took the business down with it.”The test that separates a pivot from a restart — name what carries over — applied before a pound is committed to the turn.
The advisor's version“My clients ask me where to go next and I have no framework for the question, only opinions.”Fifteen named pivots to walk a client through, each with its own mechanic, so the recommendation is a map rather than a hunch.

The challenge

Find the place you have stopped turning.

Take the fifteen pivots and mark each one honestly: turned in the last three years, or not. Most owners find two or three marked and twelve untouched. Now look only at the untouched ones and ask which of them your existing buyers, reputation and infrastructure would carry without a new investment. There is usually one obvious answer. Write down what turning it would cost you and what the first month would be worth.

How you will know it is done Fifteen pivots marked turned or not, one untouched pivot chosen, and its cost and first-month value written down for your pod.

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 marked the fifteen pivots turned or untouched and named where you stopped turning.

What it multiplies Modelling what redeploying the same buyers, reputation and infrastructure toward that heading is worth, and shortening the turn itself until the field cannot copy it in time.

The trap Turning in twelve directions at once because each turn just became cheap. Fifteen half-pivots is not a Power Pivot; it is a vessel with no heading at all, and the ground you were standing on is gone by the time the third one is running.