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Exponential Entrepreneurs

The 97  ›  Leverage

12 Pillars of Strategic Business Growth

The point

There's 12 pillars of strategic business growth that you want to live your business life by, starting with continuously discovering hidden assets and overlooked opportunities, and building on multiple profit sources instead of one.

Jay Abraham · Beyond Exponential — Four-Hour Master Course, 15 July 2022 Cued to 2:43:35 6 min 50 sec loading…

Why it matters

A business resting on one revenue source is a building standing on one column. The same holds for one habit of thought, one relationship, one channel. There are 12 columns under a business that keeps on growing, and the 9 you cannot name are where the stall lives.

Some sit underneath, in what you already own. Hidden assets and overlooked opportunities that cost nothing and yield enormously. Cash windfalls mined every single month out of what is not being done, not being packaged, not being converted. Success engineered into every action, because only about 3% of what happens is genuinely outside your control. Multiple profit sources, each carrying part of the weight.

Others decide how far a single hour or a single relationship carries. Being different, special and advantageous in your client's eyes rather than your own. Real value, defined by what value means to them. Maximum personal leverage, off the low-value hours and onto the $10,000 and $100,000 ones. Intelligence you do not own, borrowed by networking and masterminding.

The rest are habits rather than assets. Idea generation until you are the recognized innovator in your market. Growth thinking as a daily habit with accountability behind it. Risk reversed on both sides, so the downside is near zero and you try far more, far faster. Small safe tests that kill the dangerous risks first. Most people engineer failure or mediocrity without ever choosing it. You will engineer one or the other.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Leaning harder on the 2 or 3 pillars you are already good at. A business almost never stalls on its strengths. It stalls on the pillars that were never built, and doubling the strong ones cannot lift what they are not holding.

The test: Name the 12 without looking, then mark the ones you touched this month. The ones you could not name and the ones you never mark are the same list.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

WhoWhat happened
ColdHubsRents cold-room space by the crate at a flat 100 naira a day, stretching produce shelf life from two days to 21.
Bean NinjasBuilt bookkeeping as a monthly subscription from a standing start, reaching 53 clients and $10,500 of monthly recurring revenue within ten months.
BevcraftDrove mobile canning lines into craft breweries that could not afford their own, handling 20 million cans in 2020 with 17 staff.
Bi-Rite MarketRestocked the family corner grocery like a chef, not a category buyer, reaching $4,000 sales per square foot against a $500 to $1,000 supermarket average.
BossardTook over the customer's own small-parts replenishment instead of selling screws by the box, cutting ABB's parts-handling process costs by more than 25%.
Bread Ahead Bakery SchoolTaught free daily baking classes on Instagram Live through lockdown, then sold £25 Zoom workshops; 40,000 followers arrived in 10 days.
BreadfastStarted as a fresh-bread delivery round in Cairo in 2017 and now processes over one million grocery orders every month.
Bright Family Eye CareAdded a paid wide-field imaging screening to comprehensive exams; more than 95% of patients accept it, generating over $50,000 a year.

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.

  • Growth stalled and nothing explains it“We are doing everything we have always done, doing it well, and the numbers have simply stopped moving.”The 12 pillars a growing business stands on, and which of them you have never built, because that is where the stall actually sits.
  • Everything rests on one column“If we lost our biggest line of business tomorrow I honestly do not know what would be left.”Multiple profit sources, each carrying part of the weight, so no single loss can bring the whole structure down.
  • There is money here and i cannot see it“People keep telling me this business is sitting on money and I genuinely cannot see where.”Where to look — distribution, brand, sales force, the clients who went quiet, your media, every segment you serve — and what a hidden asset looks like when you find one.
  • Every idea feels like a bet“New ideas feel like a bet I cannot afford, so most of them never get tried at all.”Risk taken off the table on both sides and a small safe test in front of every big move, so you try far more, far faster.
  • Growth thinking only happens in a panic“I think hard about growth when something goes wrong and not once in the months between.”Growth thinking as a daily habit with accountability behind it, instead of a mood that arrives when the diary allows it.
  • The advisor's version“I keep handing clients one good tactic at a time and none of them ever changes the trajectory.”A 12-part structure to assess any client against, so your advice lands on the pillar that is missing rather than the one they already run well.

The challenge

Score the 12, then build the weakest one.

Write the 12 down the left of a page: hidden assets, monthly cash windfalls, engineered success, multiple profit sources, being different in your client's eyes, real value defined by them, maximum personal leverage, borrowed intelligence, idea generation, daily growth thinking, reversed risk, rapid safe testing. Score each out of 10 on the last 90 days of actual work, not on what you believe about yourself. Take the lowest and act on it in the next seven days: one dormant asset back to work, one test run, one client asked what value means to them.

How you will know it is done The 12 scored on one page, dated, and one act against the lowest score finished in the next seven days rather than scheduled for later.

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 hunted one anomaly in your own numbers by hand and found what it meant.
What it multiplies Reading correlations, implications and anomalies across distribution, media, quiet clients and segments at once, then surfacing the small safe tests worth running against each pillar you ignore.
The trap Mining coincidence. Given enough history, a model will hand you correlations by the hundred, and without having verified an anomaly yourself you cannot tell a windfall from noise, so a year of confident work gets engineered onto something that was never there.