Jay Abraham and Sir John Harvey Jones

I’m lucky enough to be on the mailing list of probably the greatest marketer I’ve ever met, or known. That is Jay Abraham.

He’s just released a transcript of an interview he did with Troubleshooter, Sir John Harvey-Jones, in front of a large audience of entrepreneurs.

It makes very interesting reading and I thought I’d share just two of the many nuggets I came across.

Company growth in the UK is handled badly

Sir John Harvey-Jones notes that in the UK we don’t tend to grow our companies very well and he says,

“Our problem is that below the very large companies, we have not been very successful in starting up enough high-ambition, high-aspiration, small to medium sized companies, and even worse than that, we have been appallingly bad at growing small and medium sized companies into medium and large-sized companies. And unless we can reverse that trend, we are going to go on down the slot.”

Company growth needs to be handled strategically, so that you know where you’re going to end up. And I know from the companies I go into that most, if not all, have no idea where they want to get to.

I’ve lost count of the number of business people I’ve met who want to get rid of their business because they want to start another, or want to retire or to move abroad and who can’t.

And the reason they can’t is that they are the business, they’ve had no strategy, they’ve not grown to the point where the business can operate completely without them.

Don’t let that be you. As I keep banging on about choose a strategy to follow and then choose your tactics. That way you’re going to arrive at your goal, usually sooner rather than later.

Different Thinking Works

And at the end of the interview Sir John Harvey-Jones says to Jay Abraham:

“We badly need your thinking, because we badly need to get a new injection of new thinking, and rather more risk taking, if we’re to even begin to achieve what, despite your depression the government, I still think you all count.”

And as I use Jay’s strategies and techniques myself I know they work. In fact I’ve been using them for a long time in my work with my coaching clients.

I used to be so enthusiastic about helping business grow that I used to give everything I knew, or had learnt or had worked out away for free. However, I’ve discovered that if you don’t pay you don’t pay attention so the only thing I do that is completely free is this business blog.

And I’m still deciding whether to make this blog a split site. One part with my normal business content and opinion and then a paid for premium content part that really works on specific areas of business in the way I do with my clients. What do you think?