PEQ: Optimizing Your Performance Enhancement Quotient

The point

You want to find what the ones having the highest positive performance in each sub-process are doing differently than the other 99, and you teach that method to the other 99.

Jay Abraham · Taking Your Business Profits Beyond Exponential — Six-Hour Master Course Cued to 2:59:56 1 min 45 sec loading…

Why it matters

Deming built his life's work on one premise: the growth you are reaching for is already sitting inside the business you own. Overlooked opportunities. Under-recognised relationships. Lacklustre distribution channels. Every one is still yours, and every one is running far below what it can do. Name every activity that moves this business, and the velocity it moves at. Who does it. Who measures it. Who gets the best result, at what, and when. Then rank each by the value it carries; the ones worth most are rarely the ones getting the most attention. Now look at the variance. The gap between your average performer and your best is growth you already own and have already paid for. Your Performance Enhancement Quotient on any activity is that average divided by that best, so 0.6 says 40% of the activity's output is sitting unclaimed. In most businesses I examine, nobody has written down what the best opener or the best closer actually does. Interview them, observe them, and keep asking until the method and the sequence come out in words others can follow. The best way then becomes the only way. Performance is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics, and the larger half is where the leverage hides. Multitasking quietly halves your best people's output; one task with your whole attention returns two times as much, or better. Optimisation is committing yourself to the highest and best use of everything you do: action, investment, opportunity cost.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Treating your best performer as a personality rather than a procedure. Nobody interviews them, nobody writes down what they actually do, and the day they leave the method leaves with them, so the gap gets admired for years instead of closed.

The test: Name your best closer by the numbers, then name the three steps they take that your average closer does not. If the second answer is vaguer, you have not looked.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
SkinRN Aesthetics	Three disconnected systems became one that let clients book themselves and reminded them, ending no-shows entirely and lifting service sales 40%.
Two Roads	Standardised its bookkeeping processes and split into small teams. Recurring revenue rose 55% and client numbers 60%, with no extra staff hours.
VIBCO Vibrators	Reorganised repairs into cells that finish a job end to end, cutting the three-week wait customers endured by 80%.
Accsys Technologies (Accoya)	Modifies plantation softwood to outlast tropical hardwood, then prices it as hardwood. A record 77,237 cubic metres shipped in the year to March 2026.
Bathu	Put more than 30 stores and the online shop onto one shared till and stock system, and revenue rose 26%.
Bi-Rite Market	Stocked the family corner grocery like a chef, not a category buyer: $4,000 in sales per square foot, where supermarkets average $500 to $1,000.
Bossard	Took over the customer's own restocking of small fasteners instead of selling screws by the box, and ABB's process costs fell over 25%.
Buttondown	Folded the starting-from-scratch option into its pricing calculator, and completed registrations among pricing-page visitors rose from 6.7% to 9.5%.

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 hunted outside a business already leaking it“Every growth plan I write starts with new customers or new spend, never with what this business already owns.”Deming's premise turned on your own company: the overlooked opportunity, the under-recognised relationship and the lacklustre channel that are still yours and still under-performing.
No number on who is actually best“If you asked me who gets the best result at opening, or at closing, I would give you an opinion rather than a number.”Every activity that moves the business named with the velocity it moves at, who does it, who measures it, and who genuinely gets the best result.
The best method lives in two people's heads“A couple of people here are far better at this than everyone else, and none of what they do is written down anywhere.”The interview and the peer observation that pull the method and the sequence out of your best performer and make it the standard everyone works to.
We fixed the process and nothing moved“We rewrote the procedure, bought the software, and the numbers came back almost exactly where they had been.”Why performance is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics, and what a fix aimed only at the smaller half will never reach.
Constant multitasking read as a healthy business“My people run three tasks at once all day, and I have always taken that as the sign of a busy business.”What single-tasking returns against multitasking, two times the output or better, on the same people and the same hours.
Prescribing new work before measuring the existing work“I keep recommending new initiatives to clients whose existing operation is running at half of what it could, and neither of us has measured it.”A ranked variance study of the client's own operation, so the first gain you produce is funded out of what they already own.

The challenge

Interview your best performer and make their sequence the standard.

Rank by value the five activities that move the most money through your business. Take the top one and find, by the numbers not reputation, who gets the best result and who the average. Write that gap as a quotient, average divided by best, and date it. Then sit with your best performer for an hour and have them walk you through it move by move, including what they never do. Write that sequence as the standard, hand it to everyone doing that work, and re-measure the quotient in 90 days.

How you will know it is done Five activities ranked, a Performance Enhancement Quotient written and dated for the top one, and that best sequence handed to everyone doing the work.

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 sat with your best performer, watched the task, and written down their method.

What it multiplies Measuring the variance between your best performer and your average one across every subprocess at once, and telling you which gap is worth closing first.

The trap Standardising the average method because it is the one with the most data behind it. The best way is usually rare, and a model fed on everything will quietly regress your top performer toward the middle while reporting an improvement.