Brunch Stories: Mindshift Bedtime Stories for Business Owners

The point

True life stories from companies who started with very modest situations, or crisis, or adversity, or resource limitations, and used their ingenuity, other people's resources and strategy beyond their competition to explode themselves.

Jay Abraham · Taking Your Business Profits Beyond Exponential — Six-Hour Master Course Cued to 18:40 50 sec loading…

Why it matters

Ice cream and toilet paper have nothing in common except the principle that grows both of them. Told plainly, that principle is gone by morning. Wrapped in a true story — a company you can picture, in trouble you have had yourself, doing something specific about it — the same principle stays with you for years.

What Jay calls bedtime stories for business builders is a montage of true accounts from companies, a few of them famous and most of them not, that started in modest circumstances, or in crisis, or with almost no resources. Every one of them got out on ingenuity, other people's resources, and strategy their competitors did not have.

Each story runs in a fixed shape: the problem, then how they overcame it, then the result, and then a return pass that names the driver and the key element that actually did the work. Skip the return pass and you have entertainment.

Read them the way a builder reads blueprints. Whether a story comes from your industry is the wrong question — Colonial Penn Insurance, Carnival Cruises, the Home Shopping Network and Porsche look nothing like each other, and each one grew on the same handful of moves. The question is which single move inside the story you could run in your own business this month. Collect enough of them and you stop starting from blank paper; you start from what already worked for somebody else.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Filing every story by industry. You hear what Carnival Cruises did about a problem, decide your business is nothing like a cruise line, and file the story under interesting. The move inside it is never tested, because the label on the outside disqualified it.

The test: Name the last three business stories that changed how you operate. If all three come from your own industry, you have been filtering on the label, not the move.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Anticimex	Sells sensor traps on subscription alongside its chemical call-out work; owner EQT reports those contracts run 30 percent larger with half the cancellation rate.
Atlantic Sea Farms	Gave lobstermen free kelp seed and guaranteed to buy every pound, turning idle winter boats into 1.3 million pounds harvested in 2024.
BURN Manufacturing	Makes the Jikokoa charcoal stove and sells it for $40; investor Acumen says it saves Kenya's urban households up to $250 a year.
Jetro Holdings / Restaurant Depot	Independent restaurants were too small for a distributor's truck, so it sells from members-only warehouses with no salesmen and prices under the delivering wholesalers.
Pangdonglai (Xuchang, Henan, China)	A provincial grocer could not outbuy the chains, so it doubled staff pay and granted unhappy leave; shoppers now travel provinces to reach it.
InPost	Failed doorstep deliveries cost too much, so it planted 20,000 parcel lockers on Polish streets and let customers walk the last hundred metres.
Klarna	Drowning in repeat questions, its assistant took two-thirds of service chats in one month, the work of 700 agents, cutting waits to two minutes.
Zipline (Rwanda)	Rural clinics wasted the blood they had to stock, so central storage and a thirty-minute drone drop replaced holding any stock at all.

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.

Everybody here copies the same three competitors“We benchmark against the other firms in our category and every one of us is running the same playbook.”Moves already proven in industries that share nothing with yours, where none of your competitors is looking.
I read a lot and nothing sticks“I go through the books and the podcasts and by the next week I could not tell you one idea I kept.”The same principle carried inside a true story, which is the form that survives past morning.
That would never work in our industry“Somebody brings an idea over from another business and my first sentence is always why we are different.”A way to read a story for the single move inside it rather than the label on the outside.
We start every problem from zero“Each time something breaks we sit down and invent an answer as though nobody had ever faced it before.”A growing collection of moves proven somewhere else, so you start from what worked instead of from blank paper.
Good stories no lesson“I enjoy hearing what other companies did and I never come away with anything I could actually run.”The four-beat shape that names the driver out loud, which is what turns an anecdote into an instruction.
The principle lands in the room and dies outside it“My clients nod at the principle in the room and none of it is in place when I come back.”The story form that makes a principle stay, and the return pass naming the driver so a client can act on it.

The challenge

Borrow one move from an industry that is not yours

Take three businesses on this page whose customers, price and product have nothing to do with yours — the pest-control firm, the kelp farm, the stove maker in Kenya will do. Write each one out in four beats: the problem they had, what they did about it, what it produced, and the driver, the one element that actually did the work. Then set your three drivers side by side and pick the one you could run in your own business inside 30 days. Put a date on it before you close the page.

How you will know it is done Three stories written out in the four beats, three drivers named in plain words, and one move on your calendar with a date.

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 taken one move from a story outside your industry and run it yourself.

What it multiplies Reading across thousands of businesses that look nothing like yours and returning the ones whose problem matches yours structurally, with the driver and the key element already named.

The trap Collecting a thousand borrowed moves and running none of them. And the collection cannot be trusted either: a model asked for cross-industry examples produces beautifully shaped ones that never happened, and a story that did not happen teaches a driver that does not work.