The Massive Leverage of Relationships

Over the past three weeks, I’ve explained that marketing, strategy, and business plans are three of the key leverage-producing “drivers” of business growth. Today, let’s look at one more: your relationships. What are the various leverage relationships you have? The business relationships you have, the professional relationships you have, the collegial relationships you have, the mastermind relationships you have — all these offer you incredible upside leverage potential.

Let’s take a closer look.

First of all, you’ve got professional relationships with other colleagues in your field all over the city, the state, the region, the country, North America, and/or the world.

What if you decided you were going to start regularly bringing these people together by phone, by letter, in person, at events — and you were going to pick their minds. And you were going to mastermind with them to find their highest-performing approaches, the solutions to problems they’ve already faced, their best-performing marketing systems/strategies, their best cash-flow management techniques, their highest and best ways to use capital and people, and their operating approaches.

But that’s just your business relationships. What about the professional relationships you’re in? Could any of those people introduce you to other people that you could benefit from knowing or other business opportunities?

And what about all of your successful friends and business colleagues? Don’t you think you could learn of marketing opportunities, selling opportunities, and management opportunities by picking their minds? Every one of the relationships you’ve got is an incredible leverage opportunity. By asking questions, doing more than just going through the process of living life and taking in oxygen and spewing out carbon monoxide, you can achieve amazing things!

Your best clients, even if they stopped buying from you, can refer new people to you. They can buy other things from you. All your business neighbors (if you’re a retailer) are valuable. Everyone in your entire complex of relationships can refer people to you.

What about your knowledge and work-experience bases? In a four-hour video that I did of my life in marketing, I explain how every experience I had, even when they were totally unrelated, contributed to my combined knowledge base. I was able to borrow from everybody in any kind of business in any industry.

If I were you, I’d tap into all of your relationships regularly. First and foremost, I would start picking their minds. I’d ask them questions. I’d tell them my problems. Tell them my goals. I’d ask them questions about whatever their area of skill is . . . the highest performing thing they did to accept or solve the issue or objective you’re intent in learning about . . . the secret to be successful at it . . . what their company or their employer or their industry does best that you don’t do well.

I’d ask them a myriad of questions that would expand my knowledge base proficiency and perspective. I’d write their answers down. I would record them. I’d add it all to my current operating system. I would keep borrowing the success processes

I learned from all kinds of different people and apply them to my business opportunities or challenges. I would tell them about the kind of business I’m in, the kind of prospects I look for, the kind of challenges I’ve got, the kind of production, manufacturing, product or service rendering, and activities I engage in. Because when they know all that, you can ask them for ideas, for recommendations, for referrals, for introductions, for ways to access their knowledge or network base. That combination can be massive for you. Another powerful driver of success.

This completes my short-course introduction to the concept of increasing your profitability and competitive superiority by focusing on the four highest-leverage-producing drivers of business growth: your marketing, your strategy, your business plan, and your relationships. I hope it was enough to get you thinking, to get you analyzing, to get you comparing, to get you ruthlessly focused on examining whether or not you’re even close to having the highest and best performing approach in each of the four categories we’ve talked about in the past few weeks.

(Ed. Note: Jay Abraham is a unique and distinctive authority in the field of business performance enhancement and the maximizing and multiplying of business assets. He has produced thousands of success stories and has made billions for others as well as millions himself.)