The 97 › Strategy 5 › Quarter 1, month one · the foundation

Power Parthenon

The point

One pillar is not a business. It is an exposure you have not priced.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result Immersion 1 min 39 sec

A Beyond Exponential Strategy. The Power Parthenon of Geometric Growth. Reduce your concentration risk while you multiply performance by orders of magnitude.

Why it matters

Jay draws the Parthenon because of what it is standing on. Many pillars, none of them individually critical, holding a roof that stays up when any one of them fails. Then he draws the alternative and calls it the diving board — a single plank, anchored at one end, and everything you have built standing on the far end of it.

Why a Parthenon. All its support pillars. Limit your revenue to a single approach. Ask what could go wrong, and what it could compromise. “I call it the Power Parthenon because it metaphorically reminds me of the Parthenon in Greece, with all its support pillars.” Many pillars share the load of the roof. Each pillar carries part of the weight. No single one holds up the whole.

Most businesses are diving boards. One product that carries the revenue, one channel that brings the clients, one client who is a quarter of the book, one person who knows how the thing actually works. It feels like focus while it is working, and every one of those is fine right up until the moment it is not.

The problem with one. The Diving Board Philosophy. Most businesses rely on a single marketing approach to grow and sustain everything. It works like a diving board. One plank, one bounce, and all the weight on it. What happens when that one approach becomes less effective? Your business stream diminishes. You begin to lose market share.

The distinction that matters is that pillars are not diversification. Diversification spreads you thinner across unrelated things. A Parthenon adds revenue streams under the same roof, serving the same buyer, using what you have already built — which is why each new pillar is cheaper than the last rather than more expensive.

The Parthenon Philosophy. Every pillar is a revenue stream. Add external sources and diversify your client base by building a wide array of ways revenue reaches you. Direct sales. Joint ventures. Referral systems. Host-beneficiary relationships. Endorsements. Direct mail. Advertising. A developed back end. Each one you add is another pillar under the roof.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Building the second pillar out of something unrelated because it looked like a bigger opportunity. That is not a second pillar, it is a second business, and you now have two diving boards and half the attention.

The test: does the new stream use the buyer, the reputation or the infrastructure you already own? If it uses none of the three, it is a distraction wearing a strategy's clothes.

How you install it. Stabilize revenue: safer, faster, easier. You don't build every pillar at once. You install them on a schedule. Assess your current sources and pick the new methods worth adding. Set the measurement, the budget, and an owner for each channel. Launch a few at a time, track weekly, and keep what works. Then double down on the winners and add more pillars.

Where it shows up — fourteen worked examples

Eight of these are companies that got it wrong. That is deliberate — the failures are more instructive here than the successes.

Company	What happened
Kodak	Organised its entire financial life around film even after inventing the digital camera. Bankruptcy, 2011.
Blockbuster	Six and a half thousand stores became the trap rather than the moat once desire moved to mail, kiosks and streaming.
Borders	Outsourced its online sales to Amazon in 2001 — and handed a competitor the next pillar.
BlackBerry	Secure email was a column, not a temple. Sales fell from twenty billion to barely two.
GoPro	A thrilling brand on one pillar. A product category is not a platform once phones improve.
Disney	One character becomes film, streaming, parks, merchandise, licensing, games and cruises — each pillar feeding the others.
Apple	Around the iPhone: Services, Wearables, the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, retail. A dominant pillar needs companions, not disappearance.
Berkshire Hathaway	Insurance float funds investments while railroads, energy, manufacturing and retail each earn — weakness in one rarely threatens the whole.
Sony	Reinvented from a consumer-electronics icon into PlayStation, music, film, anime, image sensors and financial services.
Tencent	A digital city inside WeChat — social, payments, gaming, advertising, mini-programs, enterprise tools at once.
Garmin	Refused to die with car GPS. Fitness, outdoor, aviation, marine and golf, to record revenue.
Deckers	Built HOKA into a second engine beside UGG rather than depending on one line.
O'Reilly	Serves DIY retail and professional repair shops from the same store, inventory and distribution.
A one-owner PT clinic	A surgeon referral moat, a profit-leak audit, and a borrowed fitness membership model. The small-business version.

The math. Pillars don't add, they multiply. Direct sales, joint ventures, referrals, host-beneficiary, advertising, back end. Combine a wide array of approaches and ask what happens to your revenue and profitability. 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10. When you build a Power Parthenon it is many times more than you had before. It takes your profits beyond exponential.

The work ahead. “One pillar can crack. The temple still stands.” Add a pillar and revenue reaches you one more way. Lose a pillar and the structure still holds. Combine them all and the whole moves beyond exponential. The work ahead is building new pillars for your Power Parthenon of Geometric Growth. Becoming an Exponential Entrepreneur.

The challenge

Find the plank you are standing on.

Work out what percentage of last year's revenue came through your single largest channel, and what percentage came from your single largest client. If either is above forty, you have found it.

Do not fix it yet. Write both numbers where you will see them.

How you will know it is done Two percentages, written down, from real figures rather than an estimate. Share both with your pod — including if the answer is comfortable.