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

The 97  ›  Leverage

9 Drivers of Exponential Profit

The point

The nine key (easy) shifts or ultimate upside leverage points to propel enormous multiplied performance for merely altering the way you use the very same resources. You change your X and you change your results.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 1 Cued to 2:57:00 1 min 44 sec loading…

Why it matters

Why do some companies perform five, ten, fifty times more successfully than others in the same industry, in the same economy, often with fewer resources? What separates them is which levers they pull and how hard they pull them, and there are nine of those levers rather than a hundred.

Change your strategy. Change your marketing. Change your business model. Change your capital. Change your relationships. Change your distribution channels and markets. Change your products and services. Change your process, procedures and systems. Change your ideology. That is the complete list, and there is nothing on it you have to go out and buy.

Here is the gap almost nobody can see. Most private companies do not know the rate of return they are getting from the revenue levers they are already funding. The money is going out every month and the return stays invisible, which is precisely where the hidden opportunity is sitting — not in something new, but in something you are already paying for and have never measured.

The difference between being tactical and being genuinely strategic is the difference between mediocrity and millions more, because strategy adds a third dimension to two-dimensional thinking. Pull one driver tenfold, then a second, then a third, and they do not add. Ten by ten by ten. You do not need all nine at once. You need the driver with the widest gap between where you are and where you could be.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Pulling the lever you enjoy pulling. Every owner has a favourite driver — usually marketing or product — and pulls it repeatedly while eight others sit untouched, which is why effort keeps rising and results keep flattening.

The test: Score all nine drivers out of ten in five minutes. The widest gap is your answer, and it is almost never the one you have been working on.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

WhoWhat happened
SpotifyChanged the business model rather than the product — tens of millions listen free while advertisers fund them, and listeners convert later.
MercadoLibreChanged products and distribution together, solving payments, logistics, credit and advertising so each made the others worth more.
Wesray CapitalChanged the capital. It bought Gibson Greetings for about $80 million using roughly $1 million of its own cash.
Progressive InsuranceChanged the process. Finer risk reading became its core competence rather than accepting the industry's rough averages.
PatagoniaChanged the ideology, and held it so genuinely it ran an advertisement headlined Don't Buy This Jacket.
CintasChanged distribution. One weekly route now carries uniforms, mats, first aid, restroom supplies, safety and fire protection.
Old SpiceChanged the marketing by changing who it spoke to — the women who buy men's grooming — and body-wash sales more than doubled.
IKEAChanged the product and who does the work at the same time. Flat-pack and self-assembly lowered the price and widened the market.

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 pull the same lever every year“Every plan we write is a marketing plan, and I could not tell you when we last changed anything else.”Nine named levers rather than the one you enjoy, and a twenty-minute score that shows which of the other eight has the widest gap.
  • We fund things we have never measured“There are four things we spend real money on every month and nobody here knows what any of them returns.”The return on the levers you are already paying for, which is where the hidden opportunity sits — in spending, not in something new.
  • Effort is rising and results are flat“We are working considerably harder than three years ago for a number that has barely moved.”The reason one lever pulled harder stops paying, and the arithmetic of three pulled together instead — ten by ten by ten.
  • We are tactical and call it strategy“Our strategy meetings are a list of things to do next quarter, and I suspect that is not strategy.”The third dimension strategy adds to a list of things to do, and what it cascades into once a single driver is pulled with real strategy behind it.
  • We think growth needs new resources“Every idea for growing this business starts with hiring somebody or buying something.”The same resources put to their highest and best use, with nothing to buy and nothing to invent.
  • The advisor's version“I am hired for one lever and I can see four others that would pay more, and I have no way to raise them.”A nine-driver diagnostic that surfaces the four levers nobody hired you for, which is a larger engagement and an easier one to justify.

The challenge

Score the nine and pull the widest gap.

Write the nine drivers down the side of a page: strategy, marketing, business model, capital, relationships, distribution and markets, products and services, process, ideology. Score each out of ten for where you are, then again for where you could realistically be inside a year. Subtract. The largest gap is where your next year of leverage is, and the exercise takes twenty minutes. Then name the first move on that one driver and start it in the next seven days.

How you will know it is done Nine drivers scored twice, the widest gap identified by subtraction, and the first move on that driver started in the next seven days.

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 scored all nine drivers by hand and found your own widest gap.
What it multiplies Measuring what every lever you already fund actually returns, month after month, so the money going out stops being invisible and starts being ranked.
The trap Pulling your favourite driver harder. Aimed at the lever you already enjoy, it makes marketing ten times louder while capital, ideology and distribution sit exactly where they were, and the same flat year arrives faster and costs more.