At Harv’s event, Jay spent 120-minutes sharing real world examples of ways he has created passive income streams and “hands-off,” profit centers.

He told how other prosperous people have figured out how to never work again, too. Enjoying six, even seven figures annual earnings “annuities” (purely passively) with little or no capital requirement, whatsoever.

You’ll be able to learn specific, immediate ways you can apply the basics immediately to your own life or anyone else’s you want to joint venture with.

Click here to register for this free teleconference.

His goal for this new, experimental program is to deal here (and now) with the specific, biggest issues you’re struggling with or trying to get answers to — and solve them for you, there and then on that actual session’s group conference call.

If you are keen to be part of this program, attend the discover calls next week to find out more:

Thursday, November 12th at 6pm PT (9pm ET)
Friday, November 13th at 1pm PT (4pm ET)
Saturday, November 14th at 9am PT (12pm ET)

No registration is required, use the following to call in:

Dial-in Number: 512-225-3563
Passcode: 472111#

If you want more information on this program, visit the link below:

Accountability Coaching Mastermind

54 of the most influential, most respected, and most recognized business advisors in the world are joining forces to launch a monumental business altering initiative — and you’re invited.

These are the people admired worldwide — having them help YOU devise breakthrough thinking and approaches for your business is an epic opportunity. That’s why Rich and Jay named their project, League of Extraordinary Minds.

The League of Extraordinary Minds brings together power-house panels of experts all specializing in one major business building skill. In each session, these different panels will talk about the most important profitability issues, challenges and questions your business is facing and they provide the most actionable answers, ideas and solution you’ve gotten from anyone, anywhere, ever before.

Jay and Rich have purposely put this group of extraordinary business minds together and focused each expert’s content on ideas and advice that will quickly help any business out there that’s suffering from:

* Poor marketing
* No distinction or preemptive advantage
* Ineffective sales efforts
* Poor marketing message
* Lack of credibility, trust in marketplace
* Limited capital to market.

They’ve also promised to focus specific interview panels in this six week experiment on these problems:

* Too common type product/service
* No strong benefits to buyers
* Massive competition
* Mature business
* Weakly performing start-up
* Economy-caused drop in business
* Lower response rates from “on and offline” advertising
* Promotions not pulling well
* Prospects not converting like you want them to
* Margins eroding
* Old way of doing business no longer works.

Why not see if Jay and Rich’s League of Extraordinary Minds six week experiment interview Brain can be just the solution you’re after? Remember, it’s totally yours, gratis, for the entire six week experiment/try-out period.

36 hours of 100% content-rich, non-selling expert panel interview series

No one is selling anything in these interview sessions. All are sharing brilliant, ingenious, masterful and outright amazing ideas, concepts, strategies, recommendations and guidance never before available anywhere in any way or at any price.

Register here now:

League of Extraordinary Minds

To teach you how to become a legend in your prospects’ minds.

In other words, Rich and Jay are going to make you famous (and extremely profitable!).

Click here to register

For two solid hours, they’re going to help you take the first steps to transforming yourself into the dominant thought leader… the leading authority… the “Maven” of your market.

This special Free Web Broadcast is absolutely essential for you if you really, truly and sincerely want your online (or offline) business to explode past all of your competitors…

If you genuinely want to see your income multiply geometrically…

And if you want to see your business, product, service… and you… catapulted into stratospheric levels of respect, response and financial prosperity,

Simply click here to register

The web broadcast is free!

This first session is open to everyone.

Participants will get a chance to ask Jay any question about his Sticking Point strategies for creating income streams that are optimized for a challenging economy.

Click here to sign up for the Reading Room.

Subsequent sessions will only be for the buyers of his book. If you haven’t purchased the Sticking Point book, you can do it here:

The Sticking Point Solution

• your competition
• the economy
• lack of response
• Marketplace skepticism
• charging too little for your time
• not having enough time off
• not getting enough new clients

The solution to any or all of these situations lies in becoming the most trusted adviser to your market. This is an extension of the Strategy of Preeminence which tells you to become the most trusted adviser to your client.

Now, Jay Abraham & another person called Mark Harris have joined forces to put together a series of lessons on becoming the leading expert in your field, transforming yourself into a recognized authority in your niche and it’s called:

The Thought Leader Secrets Mini-course

Why Do You Want To Become The Thought Leader?

• When You’re The Thought Leader; Prospects, Clients and The Market Listens
• When You’re The Niche Leader, The Competition Worries, Not You
• When You’re A Recognized Authority, You’re Expected To Charge more
• In Tough Economic Times, Thought Leaders Still Prosper
• When Leading Experts Send Out A Message, People Eagerly Await Your Every Word

Click here to access the Thought Leader Secrets Mini Course - while it’s still available.

Many businesses are in an awful rut these days. That’s because they don’t know what steps to take to tap into what I call “the secret wealth of a bad economy.” There’s much more economic activity going on, even now, in the midst of what many are calling the worst economic downtown since the 1930s. In this article, I’ll share with you 7 smart things that successful businesses are doing in order not just to ride out the recession but to grow and thrive as never before.

1. Break down your numbers, not just month to month, year to date, and year to year, but also into categories like how many leads, how many new sales by product, average sale, and average product-source. Then, you analyze any and all correlations, implications, and anomalies this data tells you.

2. Have a systematic, strategic process in place that is designed in a predictable, sustainable, and continuous manner to bring in prospects and first-time buyers. You keep advancing and enhancing them forward to recurring purchases in a predictable enough manner that you can look at your numbers today and accurately predict what your business will be like in 90 days, 100 days, or some other timeframe.

You’re able to engineer specific, predictable growth, year after year, because you’re zigging while your competitor zags. He’s still using direct mail, while you are conducting Webinars. He’s running ads that don’t pull, while you’re tying in with affinity groups.

3. Produce not just incremental gains but exponential gains by recognizing how your business really makes money. For example, Costco studied its numbers and realized it made more money from selling memberships than from selling goods in its stores!

So it tailors its advertising and marketing to bring people back into the stores to buy things on a regular basis…so they will continue to keep their memberships in good standing. And “The Biggest Loser” TV show promotes The Biggest Loser Club, where an individual pays a yearly membership fee to lose weight in the online Biggest Loser Club. More than a million people choose to do so each quarter. Now that’s real leverage!

4. Have clarity about all of the factors that affect your business, and realize none of the problems they pose are insurmountable. In fact, the vast majority can be improved upon. You now see the potential income in any business situation and how to make it work for you in a most enriching manner. For example, you find that you have one category of buyers 10 times more likely than others, and if you approach them the right way, they are likely to buy 17 times more than your average client.

Or when ads no longer work, you know how to get free media. Or when consumers aren’t spending as much money, you know how to find alternative propositions to which they can’t say no. If marketing at corporate events or trade shows stops working for you, then you develop a distribution channel none of your competitors know about. You’ve become Wayne Gretzky, skating to where you know the puck is going to be.

5. Understand your competitors’ appeal, advantage, and differentiation in the market—and know how to pre-empt these advantages, or successfully counter-position yourself against them. Take the time and trouble to learn why certain consumers buy from your competitors and not from you, and you know how to change that. Failing to study your competitors’ strategies is like playing poker over the phone. You don’t get to pick up on their nuances and traits…and you don’t learn how to overcome them.

6. Know the alternative products and services that your prospects can buy in lieu of your products and services, including taking no action at all. Focus on proving to your prospects that choosing you represents the most astute decision any buyer could make. You know how to motivate and persuade them to take action and make buying decisions.

You will enjoy not just what I call a “static awareness” or a theoretical knowledge of your marketplace, but how to do something very cool and profitable with your prospects and clients. Remember that until you convince them to make a move, they can just as easily sit on their wallets. That’s something you can’t afford to permit!

7. Incorporate growth thinking into everything you do, every action you take, every investment you make, every contact you forge with your buyer or marketplace. Let’s take Kevin Trudeau as an example. Trudeau is famous for his books on memory and health cures. He is also a master of the infomercial. You want to know the secret to success?

Trudeau succeeds because he first runs ads before he sets prices! He would see how many calls per thousand viewers an infomercial generated, giving the price on his product…and then he set his pricing accordingly to maximize his profits. That’s a brilliant approach. Most people just assume they know how much the market will pay for a product or service, but Trudeau takes the unusual—and highly effective and compelling—step of listening to the market and seeing what they have to say.

These are just a few of the means of dislodging your business from the rut into which so many once successful businesses have now fallen. Apply some or all of these tactics you’ll be back on track to superior success.

Jay Abraham’s latest book, The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, will be published in June 2009 by Vanguard Books.

Click here to sign up for The Sticking Point Reading Room, where Jay will spend six sessions with you to go through the strategies mentioned in the book.

When we say that you or your business is stuck, we really mean that you’re stressed. You’re uncertain. You’re frustrated. Days go by, and not much happens. You spend an enormous amount of time grappling with unpleasant issues like cash flow or meeting the payroll. It feels like you’re hanging from a cliff by your fingernails.

You’d like to spend time working on highly leverageable activities, but you aren’t sure what the most intelligent steps to take might be. Or if you have some ideas, you aren’t sure where to begin or how to execute those ideas. And even if you did know, there are so many daily crises demanding your attention that it’s almost impossible to divert energy to strategic projects that could take you to the next level, extricate you from the mental miasma you’re trapped in.

Profits dry up. Ads don’t sell. Prospects don’t convert. Margins start dropping. The picture is bleak. How do we turn this ugly picture around?

One of the reasons business people are stuck is that they have no passion for what they’re doing and for whom they’re doing it. Whether they have lost their passion or never had it in the first place, they all too often focus on the wrong things. They have lost track of the game they are playing, or maybe they never understood the rules to begin with. They feel impotent to change their business, or to change their lives. Turning on and turning up the passion leads to this kind of success.

Most people in bad times cut corners in the most treacherous way they can—by downsizing human or intellectual capital, the real asset of most businesses today. That is a mistake. You can find no greater leveraging tool than the energy, passion, intelligence, connections, and entrepreneurial spirit of the human beings you surround yourself with. The mentality of “I can do it myself!” works for your six-year-old, but it doesn’t work in the “sticky” business world of the 21st century.

Ironically, the more stuck people feel, the more attached they will be become to the status quo and the approaches they are currently taking, regardless of the lackluster quality and diminishing quantity of the results they are receiving from those efforts. But if there were ever an important time to test shifting the way you think about and do business right now, it’s during tough economic times.

You might safely and conservatively test one new approach to selling, marketing, or advertising, and then discover that a second approach makes things 20% better. But don’t stop there—the third approach might make things 40% better!

The adage “grow or die” applies to everything in nature, including the life force of businesses, relationships, and the human mind. A business must constantly grow. You can’t merely be content to survive; you must commit to thrive.

You often hear people say that a house is the ultimate investment that most individuals ever make. In reality, your business is where you invest, commit, and spend as much as 80% of your waking hours. It is also where your emotions should be invested. It is where your passion should be channeled. It is where your wealth and asset value should be created and meaningfully multiplied. And yet, most entrepreneurs really don’t see it that way.

When you invest energy, time, and money in your business, you are creating not just income but real wealth. Why? Because you can sell your business for anywhere from 5 to 15 times earnings, depending on your field. Nothing else can possibly touch that level of return. And by relieving yourself of all the stress you feel, your family will love you even more, too!

You not only deserve the maximum current and future pay-out from your business, you should expect it, both in tangible and intangible forms. You deserve more success, a constantly expanding income, total certainty, a high net worth, and all the perks of success. Yes, that certainly means financial wealth, but it also means satisfaction, gratification, low stress, fulfillment, the lifestyle you desire, and connectivity with the people you love.

Jay Abraham’s latest book, The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, will be published in June 2009 by Vanguard Books.

Click here to sign up for The Sticking Point Reading Room, where Jay will spend six sessions with you to go through the strategies mentioned in the book.

Are you making the best possible use of everything you’ve got?

Are you getting the best return on everything you’re investing in your business—your money, your effort, and above all, your time?

Everybody knows at least one highly productive person, someone for whom there seems to be more than 24 hours in a day. This person is 10 times more productive than her competitor because she understands the concept of highest and best use. It’s a rather simple—yet inarguable—concept.

Use your time, and everything else you invest, to produce the greatest strategic, long-term pay-off.

Most businesspeople fail to view time expenditure the same way they view all other expenditures in their lives—even though time, opportunity cost, and effort are the 3 most precious, intangible assets you possess.

Instead, most people waste time on unimportant things when they could be investing it in their strategy. As a result, they miss out on valuable opportunities to grow and expand their business. Most people just don’t make the highest and best use of what they’ve got. Fortunately, you no longer have to count yourself among their ranks.

If you’re not practicing the concept of highest and best use, you’re sacrificing your potential, your profits, and your future—and most businesspeople are. So let’s talk about how to optimize the highest and best use, not just of your time, but of your relationships, opportunities, activities, and the money your business spends.

The Secret of the Highest and Best Use of Your Time and Talents

The concept of highest and best use is deceptively easy. Just use your time and your talents to the maximum potential—simple, right?

And yet, most of the world fails to do it. For starters, most people don’t have a clue which items on their to-do list actually qualify as “highest” and “best.” If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmmm. I’m not sure I do, either,” you might be working at as little as a third or less of your capacity, because you’re spending time on tasks that are far less important or result in much smaller payoff. That’s a lot of efficiency you can’t stand to lose!

Let’s try an exercise right now that will help you identify your “highest and best.”

Start by writing down the 3 most critical tasks you’re paid by your business to do. Then break down those 3 tasks into sub-tasks, for which there are usually as many as 7. Then give each of those sub-tasks 3 different values based on their relevancy, your competency, and your true passion for doing them.

Now it’s time to review what you’ve come up with. If the task is not relevant but you’re competent at it, it’s a waste of your time. If your competency in a particular task is less than average, then you’re not the most efficient person for the job, which means it’s a huge expenditure of energy and, again, a waste of your time.

For example, why should you review every employee’s time card, if doing so eats up half your day? I’m not saying the time cards shouldn’t be reviewed, but you shouldn’t be the one reviewing them first. Get someone else to do the heavy lifting, then spot-check review or audit their work. (We’ll solve the problem of just who should be doing the heavy lifting in a minute.)

What this exercise will help you do is determine which tasks you should permanently remove from your to-do list, so that you can put yourself into the geometric power position that brings the greatest yield. Whatever your tasks and subtasks may be, it’s imperative that you’re working on the most important tasks for you. Here’s the bottom line:

Anything that isn’t relevant, that you’re not competent in, or that you’re not completely passionate about should be delegated to somebody else.

This is true even if it means you need 10 people doing the same job 80% as well as you. That’s still 8 times greater efficiency and results, rather than doing 100% of the job yourself. It frees you up to focus your most precious assets—your time, energy, and opportunity costs—on the things that matter most and that deliver the most meaningful, ongoing results.

If you’ll quit trying to raise your weaknesses up to the level of mediocrity and instead do only the things that you do best while delegating everything else, you’ll get the best possible return on your investment of time in your business. You’ll make more money, and you’ll have a lot more fun.

Jay Abraham’s latest book, The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, will be published in June 2009 by Vanguard Books.

Click here to sign up for The Sticking Point Reading Room, where Jay will spend six sessions with you to go through the strategies mentioned in the book.

Almost any business can achieve astonishing growth, even in the midst of a severe economic downturn like the one we face today. I’d like to show you how.

Step one: it’s vitally important to take careful stock of all the psychological and transactional changes going on in both the minds and lives of your marketplace and in the minds and lives of your competitors. Look at the attitude and actions of all your suppliers, vendors, and support services.

You’ll probably witness the following predictable reactions: your competitors are feeling battered. Their sales and marketing approaches are generating meager results. They don’t have a tried and tested plan of action. Certainly they don’t have a proactive strategy for capitalizing on all the things going awry.

So, most typically, you’ll see them pulling back and trying to cut costs to maintain a holding pattern. Or, they’re redoubling the same ineffectual efforts that really didn’t work during the good times, but got masked by the upward force of the growing economy.

What Do You Do Instead?

Set up an offense and a defense. Offensively, you look for gaps, weaknesses, and hidden opportunity in all this adversity. And believe me: it exists in droves.

Defensively, you stop doing anything that isn’t working. Implement testing, monitoring, and measuring results so that you’ll know immediately when something isn’t working. That way you can stop wasting time and money on it right away. That saves capital by eliminating waste.

This will help you guard against loss, but you can do better than that. Your next step is to go beyond merely surviving and to begin to enact changes that will ensure that your business continues to evolve. So, begin to conservatively and safely test new approaches to replace the ones that weren’t working and that you eliminated. In other words, you move from optimization to innovation.

Joint Ventures Make More Sense (And Dollars) Than Ever Before

What are some of those direct and impactful ways? Your first plan of action should be to structure joint ventures with groups who already have access, trust, and a credible relationship with the market segment you want to reach.

This could mean going to non-competitive businesses actually selling to the same buyer you’re going after. It could mean a company selling something totally unrelated but selling to the same buying influence. It could mean going to anyone selling any product or service that your target buyer typically purchases directly before, right after or at the same time they buy the product or service you sell.

Or, it could mean you find your market’s local, regional, or national association; journal; or organization and start an endorsement deal in which they endorse, recommend, and tastefully promote your product/service directly to their members. All these deals should be done on a pure performance basis whenever possible—which is most of the time—so that you pay only the selling or endorsing source in direct proportion to the specific, actual sales that their involvement generates. You can also make similar arrangements with the sales force of any company selling directly to the same market you are targeting.

The key to this strategy is that it moves your costs from fixed and speculative to variable, contingent and result-certain. But it gets even better. These steps only comprise Stage 1 of your “crisis growth” strategy. Your entire outlook and modified approach are based on gaining more direct, favorably predisposed, highly credible access to your market in unconventional (but highly ethical) ways—that your competitors would never think to pursue. It’s all a part of the strategy of preeminence—make your product or service stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

Sales Are Still Happening, But You Don’t Hear About That On The News

Keep in mind that, even in a grossly downturned market like the one we face today, all sales don’t dry up. Sales certainly can drop 30, 40, or even 50%. But people and businesses are still purchasing things. All commerce hasn’t come to a full and absolute standstill. This realization is crucial.

Think about it. If a market normally does, say, 10,000 transactional purchases a month, and now it has dropped to 5,000, that sounds bad. And it is—for everybody else! But if you figure out how to gain preemptive access to those 5,000 transactions that are still alive and well, and you make irresistibly attractive offers through trusted sources, those prospective buyers will be all the more committed to you because you’ve offered them the solutions they need in a trying time.

When your competitors are too blinded by their own panic to reach out to the marketplace in a meaningful way, that’s when you have the best opportunity to establish yourself as the most trusted, reliable source. Instead of losing out to your competition, your business can actually grow and thrive, while everyone else you compete against is bleeding red ink.

Don’t buy into the mindset that recession equals disaster. Instead, sell…like never before!

—

Jay Abraham’s latest book, The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, will be published in June 2009 by Vanguard Books.

Click here to sign up for The Sticking Point Reading Room, where Jay will spend six sessions with you to go through the strategies mentioned in the book.