Only 3 Ways To Grow Your Business

The point

There are only three ways to grow a business: increase the number of your clients, increase the size of each transaction, and increase the frequency of each purchase, or the utility value, for each client.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 1, Opening Session: The Three Ways Cued to 3:13:28 3 min 35 sec loading…

Why it matters

You almost certainly have a list of growth ideas somewhere, pulling in different directions. When I ask an owner how many ways there are to grow a business, the guess comes back at twenty-five, fifty, a hundred. The real answer is three. A hundred tactics cannot be put in order. Three can.

Every dollar of growth comes through one of three doors. You increase the number of clients. You increase the average transaction value. Or you increase the frequency of purchase, and with it the utility value of each client. There is no fourth lever to find. Underneath the three sit ten concrete ways to pull each of them, thirty in all: risk reversal, referral systems, endorsements, bundling, premium tiers, reactivation, a developed back end.

On stage in Redondo Beach I built an imaginary company out of three numbers: a thousand buyers, a hundred dollars a transaction, twice a year. Two hundred thousand dollars. Lift each by ten per cent and revenue rises thirty-three per cent, not ten. Added, ten and ten and ten make thirty. Multiplied, ten by ten by ten makes a thousand.

So Monday is not a hunt for a new tactic. Name the lever you have been pulling, because ordinary owners work one at a time, then put a modest improvement on the other two inside the same quarter. Not every lever costs the same to pull, which is the reason to move on all three at once. All ethical, all beneficial, all noble, all preeminent.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Most owners read the three, agree with all three, and go straight back to working one at a time, almost always the client-count lever. Any lever pulled alone only adds. Pulled together, inside the same quarter, they multiply.

The test: Write your last twelve months as three numbers, clients, average transaction and purchases each, then multiply them. If the product misses your actual revenue, a number is guessed.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Intel	Co-funded personal computer makers' advertising in exchange for the Intel Inside mark, making an invisible component a famous, demanded brand.
The Redondo Beach company on stage	A thousand buyers paying a hundred dollars twice a year; ten per cent on each lever produced thirty-three per cent more revenue.
Marine Stewardship Council	Its blue label put unknown fisheries on shelves that would never have taken their catch, and now marks over twenty thousand products.
Samyang Foods	Followed one fire-noodle with carbonara, cheese and a sauce line, so the same buyer returned for the next flavour rather than the same one.
Aussie Broadband	Sold mobile, voice and business lines into a base that had only ever bought home internet, lifting revenue per customer without adding one.
Cass Information Systems	Audited freight invoices, then sold the same clients utility, telecom and waste processing, so one relationship carried four services instead of one.
Victory Farms	Built cold storage and a daily route on Lake Victoria, so its fish vendors buy every morning instead of whenever a truck appears.
Christy Ng	Started in a Kuala Lumpur bedroom making every pair to order, so a bride configures and pays for shoes no shelf could sell her.

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.

A long list with no order“I have a list of forty things we could be doing to grow, and I genuinely cannot tell you which two matter most.”This gives you three levers to sort those forty ideas into, so the list stops being a list and becomes three columns you can weigh against each other.
Only pulling acquisition“Every growth conversation we have ends up being about getting more leads, and leads keep getting more expensive.”You will see that new clients is one door of three, that the levers do not cost the same to pull, and that two of them sit inside customers you already have.
Flat revenue busy team“We are working harder than last year, we have more customers than last year, and the revenue line barely moved.”Ten per cent on each of the three levers at once produced thirty-three per cent more revenue on stage, because the levers multiply rather than add.
Numbers we have never written down“If you asked me what our average sale is or how often a customer buys again, I would have to go and look, and I am not sure I would find it.”You leave with your business written as three numbers, clients, average transaction and purchase frequency, multiplied out to the revenue figure they already produce.
Sequencing forever“We decided to fix acquisition first and then get to the other stuff, and it has been eighteen months and we are still on acquisition.”This strategy's work puts a modest improvement on all three levers with dates on the same calendar, because sequencing them is what turns multiplication back into addition.
Client wants a big idea“My client keeps asking me for the breakthrough campaign, and I want to show them the arithmetic first, but I do not have a frame that fits on one page.”You get a one-page frame, three doors and thirty ways through them, that turns your client's request for a big idea into arithmetic they can check themselves.

The challenge

Pull all three levers by ten per cent

Pull your last twelve months and write the three numbers: how many clients bought, what the average transaction was, how many times each client bought. Multiply them; the answer is your revenue. Now choose one improvement per lever that you could start this afternoon, a referral ask for client count, a bundle or a premium tier for transaction value, a reactivation letter for frequency. Put a start date on all three in the next seven days. Do not sequence them.

How you will know it is done You can show your pod three baseline numbers, three named improvements with start dates, and the revenue the three produce at ten per cent.

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 written your client count, average transaction and purchase frequency out as three separate figures.

What it multiplies Running a price test, a bundle and a reactivation sequence concurrently rather than one a quarter, and separating which lever produced which gain when all three move at once.

The trap Pulling all three levers as extraction. Ten per cent more clients, more per order, more often — and a machine optimising that has no opinion about whether the frequency it invented serves anyone. Ethical, beneficial, noble is a condition on the arithmetic, not a garnish.