The greatest business question you could ever ask yourself
And how the answer can make you millions faster than others make thousands.
You’re stuck. Your business won’t grow. In fact, it’s likely losing money. You try hard to force a breakthrough, but you just end up chasing your tail. You work hard with nothing to show for it, or worse, you don’t work anymore because you’re gun-shy. Everything you do seems to lead you down a dead end.
The pressure is building—others look to you to perform, and bill collectors expect to be paid. Is it possible for you to do something easy to get a huge, major windfall?
Yes! But it requires you to think differently.
What I’m about to share with you is the single greatest question I’ve ever asked myself in business. It’s responsible for untold millions of dollars in my bank account.
To set the stage, let’s talk poker. Imagine I have a magic wand that tells you when to hit, stay, and fold. You become an expert at reading tells to determine if someone is bluffing or has a good hand. I'll also give you full emotional control so you don't tilt and bet recklessly.
I can give you all those advantages and still out-earn you if I have one advantage: I can always find a table with bad poker players who are fast and loose with their wagers.
I don’t want to get better to get a better result-I just want everyone else to be worse.
The master question, then, is this: “How can I put forth the least effort and take the least risk to get the most exponential result?”
Why is this such a powerful question?
Results are effort-agnostic. Whether you worked for a day or a year to earn that $20, it cashes the same at the bank.
Your business should revolve around you, not vice versa. Asymmetric effort-result thinking will give you more time to have fun, connect with loved ones, and take care of yourself, making you a better businessperson.
Once you master this question, you can apply it to any industry, business, or strategic initiative. It's a rare, in-demand skill highly valued in business.
It's anti-procrastination. You procrastinate because you're overwhelmed. Now you’ll be excited to act because of how little needs to be done.
Before answering The Question, you must understand linear vs. exponential thinking. We naturally think linearly. We've been tribalists for thousands of years, living within a small geographic area, interacting with about 150 people in our lifetimes.
Only recently have we become globalized, where one tweet or tik tok video can now reach millions of people.
In business, we still use industrial-era linear thinking, as if most businesses still assemble goods in factories. Linear thinking - first this happens, then that, etc., is easy to understand. Exponential is hidden. It's hard to imagine how Instagram, with one product built in 8 weeks and 13 employees, could be sold in less than 2 years for $1 billion to Facebook.
Exponential thinking means spotting the invisible - what everyone else is missing, what perspectives aren't being considered - and tying that to unreasonable outcomes - a 10x result vs. 10%.
In this article, I can only scratch the surface of how to become a true, strategic, exponential thinker. Real mastering comes experimenting in the field. I’ll give you some hacks to give you fast ideas to try out. Consider these exponential training wheels.
I’ve uncovered simple thinking tweaks that have brought organizations exponential growth. Go through the list and identify the ones you think have the most merit in your own situation. Then design experiments to test these concepts in no/low risk conditions. If it shows promise, roll it out large. If it fails, throw it away and try another option.
Here's the list, although because exponential isn't as tidy as linear, you'll find overlap. Mix and match, using concepts as springboards. The objective is to spark ideas about the small hinges that can unlock big profit doors.
Change the rules.
Change the rules
Southwest's boarding process is unique. Yes, it's inconvenient, but it's profitable. Southwest knows the sooner they’re airborne, the more money they'll make.
Beverage companies think the product has to taste good to sell well. Not true. Beverage firms believe taste sells. False. New Coke was a flop even though it tasted better than coke and Pepsi. Redbull and Jaggermeister are disgusting yet titans of their industries. Taste is tangible, which can only improve incrementally. But bad taste has no limits. Jaggermeister tasted so bad that an article published in the Baton Rouge Advocate claimed the drink laced with drugs and aphrodisiacs.
I can’t tell you how many rules we’ve broke in the internet marketing space. We expired our webinar replays when everyone else left theirs up forever. We acquired rights to low-ticket software that did dozens of things decent (but none well). We threw out most of those features, doubled down on the two most critical features and 10x’ed the retail price. The result? Happier customers and more profits.
Learn to spot "it's always been done" mindset in your industry. Challenge conventional wisdom with small-scale tests. Must prices end in 7s? Really!?
Create a blue ocean
The book Blue Ocean Strategy posits that it's easier to establish an uncontested market space than to compete in an existing one. My aim is to do so with little effort and risk.
We were the #1 affiliate for years for Amazing Selling Machine, a program on selling physical products on Amazon. Because we located non-obvious audiences, we outsold other affiliates by tens of millions of dollars.
We proved you can sell the opportunity to:
Life Coaches
Chiropractors
Numerologists
Personal development enthusiasts
Options Traders
I didn't know if it would work, but I tried. Most thought non-traditional markets were a waste of effort. Instead, we partnered with anyone willing to test their audience and we split the profits 50-50.
I’d have pitched it to golfers if I could find a willing partner.
Us marketers presume what an audience will buy without testing. But if it's easy to try and has little downside, I'm game.
That’s why we worked with partners. They already had the audiences they could email. We’d have them preface the promotion along these lines:
“Hey, this is different from what you're used to seeing from me. This is the only time I’ll mention it to you. You’ll have to go and optin to this other list if you want more. Normally I’d never bring something like this to you, but here’s why I’m made this the exception…”
The partner doesn't get criticism from the audience, it just costs one email, and if it succeeds, we can pursue that market segment further. I've found many a blue ocean this way.
Changing the language
In 2010 I noticed:
22% of websites ran on Wordpress
Most people thought Wordpress = blogging
The marketing of Wordpress themes and plugins sucked!
There were loads of plugins to backup your blogs, but what about cloning your sites?
There were a lot of plugins back then to backup your wordpress blogs, but none focused on cloning (not backing up) your wordpress site (not blog). Entrepreneurs don't want to back up their blogs, then want to make money. They equate blogging with little to no money, but the appropriate website can make the cash register ring.
I brainstormed then taught several ways cloning a wordpress site could accelerate profit. One way was to build a master template for a local business, like a dentist. Then, reach out to any dentist with an out of date website and say “Hey, I can turn your website to this for free if you’ll let me then be in charge of your SEO…” or whatever service you want to sell.
When we blue-oceaned the Amazon course to option traders, I kicked off that webinar by saying: “Would you ever be in a market where you could buy and never sell?” No you idiot! “Why not?” Because we’d lose 100% of our money! “Do you shop on Amazon?” Of course. Everyone does. “Congrats. You’re in a market where you can only buy and never sell, which is strange because over half of Amazon’s profits come from third-party sellers… people like you and me.” All the sudden options traders wanted to become Amazon sellers.
Contextual Value
The easiest way we can glean the value of something is to compare it to something else. You might not think buying a $197 course on curing your panic attacks is a good deal, until you end up spending $3,000 going to the psychiatrist.
The problem with most value comparisons is they’re apples to oranges. it’s not really fair to compare therapy with an ebook.
Better is if you can compare a product to itself.
Example: Once upon a time Facebook fan pages had “tabs”, which could be quite lucrative if you knew how to leverage them. Problem is local businesses had no clue how to use them, and you had to build tabs in FML (facebook market language).
One day, Facebook decides to let you "iFrame" external online content into a tab, allowing you to design anything that fits in a 575-pixel frame.
We built a software that offered three options for our customers: personal users (to use for 1 fan page), professional users (10 fan pages) or power users (25 fan pages). More important was the pricing - 1 license pack was $25, 10 license packs were $75 and a 25 license pack was $99 - or another way to look at it is less than $4 per license.
(If we gave away unlimited licenses for $99, you couldn’t do the math, so users would value you less! We tested this.)
On webinars, we'd offer 100 licenses for $99, if you bought before the end of the webinar. The value quadrupled - less than a buck a license!
For us, the overhead of additional licenses was largely a sunk cost. But the perception of value made it irresistible.
Is there a way you can create tiers of your offer to make your value irresistible? Just having irresistible value isn’t enough - it has to be demonstrated!
Add a Premium
If everyone is offering the same thing, is there a low-cost bonus you can give the consumer for free that could make all the difference?
The Wholesale Formula is an Amazon course which shows a manual way to calculate the profit potential of any product you could resell on Amazon.
We knew if we added a bonus - a chrome extension that could, in one click, crunch the numbers on dozens of products automatically - we’d crush it as an affiliate. Problem - we don’t know how to build a chrome extension. Solution - call Manage By Stats. We worked out a deal with one third party company to create an extension for another third party company that we could give away for free if people bought through our affiliate link. How the heck did we pull that off?
Because Manage By Stats knew the value of being in front of a whole set of new potential customers.
Are there premiums you can add to offers (your own or as an affiliate) to tip them over the edge from great to irresistible? Can you create or procure those premiums with little cost and effort?
Consider the Opposite
On Amazon you can sort a search result either by low price or high price. There is no “sort by middle price” option. We are attracted to outliers. Being different is better than being better. Being different in a meaningful way is best of all.
In the early days of the internet, my friend Dean Jackson invented what is called the squeeze page today - a specific page designed to offer a free product in exchange for an email address. Many people had put email optin forms on their sites prior to Dean, but the thinking was you still wanted to keep your menu navigation, your logo, and other information on your page alongside the email capture form.
Dean started there, but through testing he kept removing elements, and he discovered every time he removed non-essential (not related to the free gift or optin), his conversion rate went up. Pretty soon he was left with a headline, a paragraph, a few bullet points and a short call to action to get the user to sign up for the gift.
Less was a lot more. When everyone else was cluttered, he went clean.
I remember when video started proliferating the web. Marketers started abandoning everything that wasn’t video because - duh! - video was the future. Out with the old, in with the new.
I stayed old. I doubled down on PDFs. Now I was the only one in my marketplace using them so not only did I stand out, I was also reaching users that everyone else was neglecting. When free webinars became the hot chick at the internet party, we started developing paid webinar strategies. When everyone pressured us to go shorter (tik tok, twitter, the attention span of a goldfish, blah blah blah) we went longer.
I’d rather you do a 3 hour podcast or a 3 minute podcast before you do anything in between. Whatever is popular will also have a counter-culture. Often the counter-culture, while smaller in size, is quicker to reach for the wallet.
Case in point: Apple has a smallish slice of the smartphone market, but it has the most profitable slice. Also, Apple is a closed app system vs. Google which is an open app system. Both extremes work. Most went open (the user should have more choices!), but closed made more profit.
The worst sin in marketing is to be boring. Switch it up and try an extreme because it will stir some excitement and it will force you into new territory, which is where all the breakthroughs are.
Focus on the emotional state, not the product
Tesla wasn’t the first electric car on the market. The leader prior to Tesla was the Toyota Prius, which had a branding problem - it was too hippy. A fringe appeal at best. Tesla was the fastest non-million dollar car on the road who just happened to also be electric. Owning a Tesla was cool enough that even some right-wing pro-oil Republicans ended up buying one.
In the book Alchemy, there is a quote: “It’s easier to make a train 20% more enjoyable vs. 20% faster”. Optimizing already excellent products is a game of diminishing returns.
Luxury brands know better. The first time I bought an expensive watch (language switch: timepiece), they broke out the white gloves. They “presented” the watch to me on a golden tray, while I sipped Perrier water. Those gloves looked nice, but they couldn’t have added that much to the overhead.
I went to my dentist recently and the receptionist annoyingly looked up at me from her phone when I came in, and sighed as she checked me in for my appointment. What if she had been trained to get up and come around to greet me face to face? What are other easy, no-cost ways you can enrich a customer's interaction?
We ordered some headsets once from headsets.com. I can’t remember the make or model or even cost of the headsets, but I remember they gave us two tootsie rolls alongside our order. A few pennies created a standout experience!
I can’t tell you how many times I consult with clients who will send someone during a live webinar to a product sign up page that has a video on it. I have to ask: “how could someone listen to you live on the webinar and watch a video at the same time?” They can’t.
Or on the webinar replay - a lot of people squander profits because they take the recording and don’t edit out the first part, with the sound check and the “where is everyone from?” fluff. When we do webinars, we prepare for the replay in advance. Before we “officially” begin a webinar, I have the audience breath with me. Not only does this get my audience in a more calm, conducive state for learning, but it signals to my staff to cut everything from the recording up through my deep breath exercise. Then we record for real. I come up firing with a punchy opener and an immediate slide change because I know on a replay if you stick up an opening slide for longer than 5 seconds, your bounce rate goes through the roof.
Turn a cost to a profit center
Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber. In 2020, he opened up 300 “restaurants” across the US. My kids begged me to let them order a Mr. Beast burger. I knew what was really going on.
Mr. Beast is using ghost kitchens. His burgers are mostly made in Buca di Beppos, were they’re slapped in a box with Mr. Beast’s branding. You can only order his food from a delivery app like Postmates.
Some businesses took it a step further, turning these delivery apps into SEO plays. One kitchen might have 5-10 “restaurants” it operates, niched down to specific keywords that users search for on those apps.
My friend Jay Abraham, the legendary marketing consultant, once made a fortune pairing a manufacturing company that was near bankrupt with another company that was losing money because of a production capacity issue. One had excess demand, the other had limited supply. He just had to convince the manufacturer that they could manufacture something else other than what they were “supposed to” make.
We had a procurement business where we had several agents who could go directly to Chinese factories, boots on the ground, to get price sheets for potential products and even negotiate deals. The overhead to employee the team was around $5,000 a month. We didn’t feel comfortable at that time paying the expense up front for we didn’t know the demand we’d get. Instead, we came up with a membership model - for $50 per month, you would get access to certain sourcing perks, and then you’d pay a small fee for each individual product you wanted one of our procurement agents to source for you - and your first product was free.
We only need 100 paying customers to break even on the offer. As a result, we could offer individual procurements cheaper to the customer than the competition, even after you factored in the membership cost - and we could scale up or down with demand as we wished.
Best of all, we could use this as a bonus for people who bought any course related to Amazon - “buy it through us, and your first product we’ll source for you for free!” The procurement business now didn’t need to be profitable at all - it just had to break even over here, so we can use it as a bonus over there to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
Embrace Resistance
When I first started with webinars, I was uncomfortable with the fact that it was sort of a bait and switch. Consumers back then thought a free webinar met you just trained for free, with zero ulterior motive. The reality is no one in their right mind would be incentivized to work that hard without profit, so webinar presenters lured in consumers under the false pretenses of free, and at some point switched into pitch mode.
My solution was to lean into the fact that I wanted to sell product, so early in my webinar opener I’d say something like this:
“I have two goals today. MY first is to teach you xyz. My second is to sell you something. Now if I’m not able to deliver on my promise of showing you how to do xyz for free, then I do not want you to buy what I offer you at the end. However, if I make good on my claim to teach you xyz, and the offer and price are right I expect you to buy. Deal?”
Everyone agrees to this. It made me feel comfortable, and gave me a goal - I just had to really wow the audience with my promise. I do that, I make the sale. I don’t do that, I don’t deserve the sale.
I can’t tell you how many deals I’ve closed where the person says “It’s expensive…” and I go “Yeah, it’s expensive… do you want to buy it anyway?” World class solutions often are expensive to buy, but sometimes not buying them is even more expensive.
I teach people uncomfortable with selling to lean into it and say this to their audience:
“What I’m about to do next makes me uncomfortable, so if you see me shaking and hear my voice cracking it’s because I’m scared out of my mind right now. I am about to make you an offer, and I’m afraid you’ll say no and reject me, and I’ll feel like a fool. However, I’m going to make it anyway, at my own discomfort, because I know if you’re a right fit for it, it’ll be a life saver to you. But be kind as I might stumble, and jumble it all up. Hang in there with me as we go over this…”
Ryan Holiday’s book title says it all: The obstacle is the way. How can we turn our biggest weakness into a strength? How do we turn adversity into alchemy?
Challenges You’ll Face Answering The Question
For quick review: the question is: “How can I put forth the least effort and take the least risk to get the most exponential result?”
The answer is often easy. it’s the psychology that’s hard. It’s scary at first to think this way, because it’s non-conformist. You will stand out, and it’s in our evolutionary programming to fit in, because it feels safer. But it’s not. We are no longer in the jungle, we are in the information age.
A way to ease into standing out is to do it first in front of small audiences. “Hey, I’m trying out something new over here, so only join me if you’re okay with some really weird experiments we’re about to conduct. It’s not for everyone…”
Another challenge you’ll face is the pushback from others in your industry - your competition, your contemporaries, your constituents, even your own friends and family. You’ll be challenged for being different because it will force them to realize how similar they all are to each other, and instead of owning their own sheeplike behavior, they’d rather point the finger at you for being wrong.
They won’t get it. Even when you set records and make millions, they still won’t get it. Love them anyway. Not everyone was designed to be an exponential thinker.
Finally, don’t get stuck on overcomplicating the implementation of these exponential experiments. Fail quick in low cost fashion. It’s hard to know what will work, or when it will work. The world is chaotic and illogical. I don’t try to make sense out of it.
I like to think of business breakthroughs like this. I see myself in a room with doors all around me. All but one of those doors are locked. Each door looks identical, so how do I find the one that leads me to freedom? I'm just turning knobs. In the grand scheme it doesn’t matter if it’s the first knob I try or the third or the fifth or the tenth. If I keep turning knobs, sooner or later I’ll gain my freedom.
Run experiments. It only takes one to hit and you get an exponential result, to make more money in one month than you did the previous year or maybe even a decade, or perhaps a lifetime. I’ve seen it happen more than you’d guess. All from a steel-eyed focus on this:
“How can I put forth the least effort and take the least risk to get the most exponential result?”