Ultimate Leverage and OPR

The point

7 forms of other people's resources: money, time, work, experiences, ideas, distribution, current clients. It lets you maximize and multiply and stretch your management, your talent, your economic, technical and operational resources.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 2, with Sam Woods and Dr Barnard Cued to 42:49 7 min 4 sec loading…

Why it matters

Why spend your own finite money, time and effort building what the world has already built? Almost everything you need to grow — the capital, the distribution, the credibility, the clients — exists somewhere already, funded and in motion, and your leverage is the arrangement that lets you put it to work.

That is the difference between growing by addition and growing by multiplication. Add your own resources and you get the sum of what you can personally fund. Leverage other people's and you get the product of what several parties have already built.

There are seven doors standing open and most owners walk past all of them. Other people's money. Other people's time. Other people's work. Other people's experience. Other people's ideas. Other people's distribution. And other people's current clients — which is usually the largest of the seven and the one nobody asks for.

So turn the question on yourself before you commit another pound of your own. What does this capital actually return? What does an hour of your time return, or your experience, or your people, or your activity, or the opportunity you are about to take instead of another? Wherever your own resource earns less than somebody else's would, you have found the door. Spend where your return is highest and borrow the rest.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Assuming access has to be bought. Most of these resources are idle, under-monetised or invisible to their owner, and what unlocks them is an arrangement that pays them out of the result rather than a cheque that pays them in advance.

The test: Name the last growth move you funded entirely from your own resources, and what it would have cost you to do the same thing through somebody who already had it.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Hulu	Rival media companies pooled content into a platform none of them could have built alone, reaching a valuation near $27.5 billion.
Jay's seminar business	Nothing spent on advertising, premium prices, revenue shared lavishly with partners who owned trusted audiences. Just under a quarter of a billion in four years.
A publishing protégé	Borrowed book-club economics, applied them to newsletters, and grew from eight million dollars to over a billion in five years.
An entrepreneur new to town	Leased an idle stadium's weekends and wrote in the right to bring an operating partner. That provision sold for a million up front plus twenty percent.
Airbnb	Built a lodging business on rooms other people already owned, redesigning sourcing, trust and pricing, and grew past $11 billion in revenue.
PayPal	Paid users to invite others and paid the invitees to join, buying the very growth that made the network more valuable with every account.
KeyMe	Placed thousands of key-cutting kiosks on other companies' shop floors, owning no property and no footfall, with the host paid from every key cut.
Xero	Made accountants its distribution instead of buying customers, paying them out of the subscriptions they placed, and passed four million subscribers worldwide.

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.

Everything here is funded by us“Every bit of growth we have ever had came out of our own money, our own hours and our own people.”Seven named doors into resources somebody else has already built and funded, so growth stops being limited to what you can personally afford.
We are always short of something“There is always one resource missing, and the plan always stops there rather than going around it.”The move that goes around the missing resource rather than stopping at it, because the thing you lack is almost always sitting idle nearby.
We build what we could borrow“We have spent two years building a capability that three companies near us already had.”The return test applied to your own capital, time and expertise, which shows where borrowing beats building before you commit two years to it.
We do not know what to offer a partner“I can see who I would want to work with and I have no idea what I would put in front of them.”An arrangement paid out of the result rather than in advance, which is what unlocks a resource its owner is not currently monetising.
We never ask for the client list“We ask people for referrals occasionally and we have never once proposed a real arrangement around their customers.”Other people's current clients treated as the largest of the seven doors, and the shape of the ask that gets it opened.
The advisor's version“My clients are resource-constrained and my advice keeps assuming they will fund it themselves.”Advice a resource-constrained client can actually act on, because it does not assume they will fund it themselves.

The challenge

Name the seven, then ask for one.

Write the seven doors down: money, time, work, experience, ideas, distribution, current clients. Beside each, name one business within reach of you that already has it in surplus. Then pick the door where your own resource is weakest and theirs is most obviously idle, and make one approach in the next seven days — opening with what it would earn them rather than what you need. That order is the whole difference between an offer and a request.

How you will know it is done Seven doors listed with a named business beside each, and one approach made in the next seven days that opened with their gain rather than your need.

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 asked one owner for an idle resource, opening with what it would earn them.

What it multiplies Mapping which businesses hold each of the seven doors in surplus, scoring them against the resource you are weakest in, and keeping the map current as their circumstances change.

The trap Sending two hundred partnership approaches in seven days and burning the only asset the strategy runs on. Access is granted by people, once, and a host who has been generically courted at scale will never open their client list to anyone again, including you.