Why Euclid’s ‘Elements’ Could Be The Key To Unlocking Your Business Growth

15Nov06

I was never fond of geometry. I have to thank my Math teacher for that. He made learning math utterly painful, ‘fingernails dragging across the board’ painful. Maybe it had to do with my father being a math wiz as well. Frustrated my dad constantly because of my inability to understand mathematical concepts and instantly applying them to solve complex problems. I was never ever going to be Charlie Eppes of NUMB3RS fame, so why not just rebel against gaining math intelligence at the peril of being tagged a mathematical imbecile?

Now as a self-aspiring entrepreneur, I may come to regret my early decisions in life. Especially when the world’s highest paid marketing consultant talks about geometry in business. You may know this guy. He goes by the name of Jay Abraham.

Smart fellow, this man. Knows a helluva lot about multiplying a business’s bottom line. His success rate as a marketing consultant is second to none. If you’re already planning to hire him, I suggest you stop reading my blog now, and I wish you the best for your early retirement and enjoy your sail for the Bahamas in your 25 million dollar yacht.

For the rest of us who can’t afford to hire Jay Abraham (for the moment at least), well, you’ve got me to dish out a few nuggets of business wisdom from the man himself.

You see, Jay Abraham is all about working on the geometry of a business, as opposed to growing a business incrementally. That’s how most businesses grow their business, incrementally, or in a linear fashion, which is burdensome.

The geometry of business speeds up growth as much as 90% (I’m not making that up) and here’s why. There are only three major ways to grow a business.

1. Increase the number of clients or buyers

2. Increase the size of the transaction or the sale

3. Increase the frequency of the purchase or repurchase

At this point, I’m going to let him do the talkin’:

If you’d take a moment to get a piece of paper and a pencil or pen, put the paper the long way, horizontally, and draw four boxes across and four boxes down. On top of the first four boxes across, write above the first box “Number Of Clients (Or Buyers),” the next box to the right, “Size Of Sale (Or Transaction),” the next box, “Frequency Of Transaction,” and the last box, “Total Revenue.” Then fill the boxes in with a hypothetical example. Say you had a business that had 1,000 clients who were buying twice a year and spending $100 every time they bought. Then the revenue or the sales of that business would be 1,000 transactions, times two, times $100, or $200,000.

(THE POWER PARTHENON STRATEGY of Geometric Business Growth)

Increasing those three numbers by a mere 10% is a piece of cake, because the odds are exceedingly low that anybody is using the very best selling/marketing activities, time or efforts to attract and close buyers. Now, underneath the 1,000, put a 10% increase, or 11,000. If you only got the $100 sale up a mere 10% to $110… You can do that by upgrading into a higher quality. You can do it by addingsome product or service. If you only increased the frequency that they came back — and if you have nothing else to sell them, you could acquire or joint venture things that were valuable extensions that you could easily acquire — or you got them to refer more people… If you increased all those numbers by 10%, the total would not be 10% more. It would be a full 33 1/3 % increase.

(THE POWER PARTHENON STRATEGY of Geometric Business Growth)

If you increase those numbers across the board by 25%, — I don’t want to reallyboggle people’s minds, but — the impact would be almost a 400% growth in the business. If you doubled all those figures, it would be 800%. That’s how you really get powerful growth.

(THE POWER PARTHENON STRATEGY of Geometric Business Growth)

(Source: Mark Victor Hansen Interview featuring Jay Abraham, Jan 18 2006)

I told you the guy was smart. You can get hold of the interview here (it’s a pdf file so you will need the Acrobat Reader to open it).

That’s about it for today’s geometry lesson but I do have something else to share with you – Traffic, human traffic to be specific.

Human traffic is something that every business owner craves for and as mentioned earlier, this is one of three ways to grow a business. Each visitor to your business site is a potential buyer or client. You will have to convert your traffic into buyers or clients to grow your business. And to do this effectively, you must understand the importance of measuring these conversions.

I’ve seen too many businesses that setup shop online only to fall by the way side because they’d failed to keep tabs on measuring their web site metrics. Only by measuring your web metrics, can you explode your business growth geometrically, as how Jay Abraham described it.

Measuring metrics is more science than art and can be a real pain in the gluteus maximus if you’re not sure of what to keep track of. But it can be the difference between zero growth, or a 200 % growth in your business.

In a future post, I will reveal the most important metric you should probably be keeping your eye on right now. And don’t feel shy about sharing your thoughts and ideas about growing a business in the comments area below. We could all learn something from one another.

Now, to find that geometry book…

P.S. if you’re planning on switching to Microsoft Vista when it hits the shelves next year, you might wanna check your PC’s hardware compatibility. To do so, click on the logo.