DRAFT — assembled from the store. Every element is read from the library; the video is cued to a coded passage.
Exponential Entrepreneurs

The 97  ›  Testing

CIA: Continuous Intelligence Accumulated

The point

Why would you not want to know everything you could about everybody in your industry and every alternative? What can you learn, what can you appropriate, what can you partner?

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 1, Session 2 Cued to 53:56 1 min 57 sec loading…

Why it matters

I get clients to answer a two-hundred-page assessment, and many of those pages ask what they know about their competition, direct and indirect. The normal answer is nothing. Not a little. Nothing. These are capable people running real businesses who cannot tell me what the three companies bidding against them charge, how they sell, or what they changed last quarter.

The three letters are the discipline. Continuous, because intelligence gathered for an occasion expires with the occasion. Intelligence, because what you are collecting is correlations, implications and anomalies your competition does not see. Accumulated, because the whole value is in the keeping. A snapshot tells you where you stood. An accumulation tells you where the market is moving, and it makes the next thing faster to spot than the last one was.

Four seams, all of them in plain sight: other industries, your clients' wins, your clients' struggles, and every move your rivals make. Each is a lesson somebody has already paid the tuition on. You never have to pay it twice. You only have to notice it and keep the note.

And of every direct and indirect alternative to you, ask the three questions that turn watching into money: what can you learn from them, what can you appropriate, and what can you partner?

The mistake almost everyone makes

Gathering it for an occasion — a launch, a board meeting, a competitor scare — and then filing it. Intelligence collected as a project expires with the project. The whole strategy lives in the last word of the name: accumulated.

The test: Ask what your three closest rivals changed last quarter and what it cost them. If nobody in the building can answer without going to look, you have no accumulation.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

WhoWhat happened
The rare-coin publisherA newsletter and a brokerage run as separate businesses. Over half the subscribers bought coins; matching them made roughly twenty-five million dollars.
A regional services companyNoticed a neighbourhood filling with young families before any data source said so. Referrals there converted at three times the rate.
Southwest AirlinesRead its real competitor as the car rather than the other airlines, and rebuilt around price, simplicity, point-to-point and one aircraft type.
John DeereTurned tractors into a precision-agriculture platform, so what a farmer buys is yield and operational intelligence rather than horsepower.
MineSense TechnologiesAsked why mining grades ore only after hauling it, borrowed X-ray sorting from another industry onto the shovel, and lifted recovery about 4%.
Seven BankRead rival banks as customers rather than enemies, put 27,422 cash machines in convenience stores, and now earns fees on their customers' withdrawals.
Iceland Ocean ClusterKeeps one running record of every use anyone finds for a single cod; the fillet worth $12 now yields $3,500 in products.
Lidl GBPrices hundreds of lines against Aldi every week and publishes the result, so a rival's moves are a standing record, not a scare.

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 do not know what they charge“If you asked me right now what our three closest competitors charge, I would have to go and look it up.”A standing record of every rival's price, offer and change, kept continuously rather than assembled in a panic the seven days you need it.
  • We learn the same lesson twice“We work something out the hard way, and eighteen months later somebody here works it out the hard way again.”A written accumulation, so a lesson somebody paid for once is never paid for a second time by the person sitting next to them.
  • Our data is averages“Everything we report is a total or an average, and I have no idea which customers are actually behind it.”The individual behaviour underneath the average, which is where the valuable customers and the promotions that changed nothing are both hiding.
  • We only look at our own industry“We benchmark against people who do exactly what we do, and everyone in the room is stuck in the same place.”Three other industries read deliberately, for the moves that are ordinary there and unheard of in yours.
  • We researched it once“We did a big competitor study for a launch two years ago and I could not tell you where the file is.”Intelligence made continuous instead of occasional, so it compounds rather than expiring with the project that commissioned it.
  • The advisor's version“My value to a client is what I have seen elsewhere, and I have never once written any of it down.”The discipline that turns a career of client wins and struggles into an asset you can charge for, rather than a memory you hope to recall.

The challenge

Start the record, and fill four seams.

Open one file in the next seven days and give it four headings: another industry, a client win, a client struggle, a rival's move. Fill each one with a single entry — dated, factual, no commentary. Then take your nearest direct competitor and your nearest indirect alternative, and write the three answers: what can you learn, what can you appropriate, what can you partner. That is the accumulation started, and it never resets again.

How you will know it is done One file with four dated entries, and the learn-appropriate-partner answers written for two alternatives, read out to 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 opened one file and filled all four seams by hand, dated and factual.
What it multiplies Reading every rival's public move daily, setting it against what you already hold, and telling you which correlation just changed rather than what happened.
The trap Gathering enormously and accumulating nothing. A machine hands you a competitor report in ninety seconds, which is the occasion-gathering mistake made effortless, and a report you can summon again tomorrow is one nobody keeps, so the record never compounds and the advantage resets every time.