Abraham's Growth Triangle

Hello to every crazy unicorn in the galaxy.

I’ve been emailing less frequently because sometimes it’s more important to do than reflect.

But my promise to you remains: every email will contain a valuable insight that will help you grow your business.

Today’s growth strategy will seem blindingly obvious once you read it, but in all likelihood you’ve never thought about it consciously.

This growth strategy was hiding in plain site for centuries and has been popularized over the past few decades by a business strategist / marketing guru named Jay Abraham.

Today’s growth strategy is Abraham's Growth Triangle.

You’ll want to write this on your wall.

You’ll want to start each day by thinking about this.

It makes business seem silly easy.

Let’s get to it…

Abraham’s Growth Triangle

Abraham’s Growth Triangle is a powerful business growth framework devised by marketing strategist Jay Abraham.

Abraham states that there are only three ways for a business to grow:

1. Increase the number of customers

2. Increase the average transaction with each customer

3. Increase the frequency of customer transactions

Most businesses focus their efforts disproportionately on acquiring new customers.

The problem is that continually adding more customers requires exponentially more resource investment for increasingly marginal returns.

Abraham’s breakthrough insight was that far greater results can be achieved by also focusing on getting more money from existing customers, and getting existing customers to transact more often.

This makes intuitive sense - an existing happy customer is much more likely to buy more and more frequently compared to skeptical new customers.

Abraham recommends that businesses have dedicated strategies across all three areas or “sides” of the Growth Triangle, helping you get the maximum effect from all three growth levers simultaneously.

This creates a compounding effect to rapidly scale your business.

Abraham found that even incremental 10% improvements across each facet could increase total revenues by at least 30%, with far higher bottom line profit margins compared to a customer acquisition-only strategy.

How to Put Abraham’s Growth Model Into Action

Here’s another trick I’ve learned:

If you want to get better at coming up with ideas, you need to practice.

Your brain will learn how to come up with ideas if you regularly force yourself to do it.

I learned this technique from this kooky dude James Altucher. You may have seen his hair all over some hideous crypto ads a few years back.

He’s a big advocate of practicing idea generation.

So that’s what I do.

Here’s how:

Suppose you have a goal at work to increase revenue by 25%.

Every morning, force yourself to brainstorm 5-10 ways you could increase revenue by 25%.

Over time your brain will develop a knack for coming up with new ideas.

Applying Altucher’s idea generation practice along the 3 dimensions of Abraham’s Growth Triangle is a surefire way to unlock more business ideas that can help you scale.

For example, each morning just pick one of the 3 ways to grow your business.

• Write down 5 ways you can acquire more customers, or

• Write down 5 potential cross-sells / upgrades to increase the value you provide your customers, or

• Write down 5 ways to increase utility to customers such that they buy from you more often

If you do this every day, you WILL eventually come up with some great ideas that can transform your business and tap into the exponential growth of Abraham’s triangle.

That’s it for today.

I hope this helps you on your growth journey.

-Brian