Toby Hecht is a businessman, entrepreneur, educator, business philosopher and author. He started his business career after graduating from Tulane University. Since then, Toby has been a top 1% performer. His work is centered around enabling businesspeople to compete in today’s marketplace. Some of his career highlights and accomplishments include:
- Successfully founding and operating three companies.
- Writing over 1300 papers and an Amazon 4.7 star rated book “Aji: An IR#4 Business Philosophy.”
- Consulting several businesses that later sold, earning the owners $8m to $30m.
- Serving as “key faculty” at General Electric’s Crotonville Business School, the #1 corporate business school in the country. He ranked as the top instructor in his field.
Since inventing Aji nearly 35 years ago, Toby has taught Aji to over 4,000 businesspeople. He has produced over 400 talks and has lead over 350 conferences teaching students how to use Aji to earn annual incomes of $400k to $4m.
How Aji Started
Toby Hecht and his wife and business partner Linda founded The Aji Network in 1984. After meeting with a financial advisor, they starkly realized that hard work and determination would not be enough to earn the income they needed to raise their children and save for retirement. What was considered a normal income during the Third Industrial Revolution was not viable in the new technologically-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution.
To prevent chronic financial stress and becoming a “parent tax” to their two children, Toby and Linda fundamentally changed the way they thought about their careers, business, and money.
Their “new philosophy” disrupted the concepts from the Third Industrial Revolution. Instead of taking the common task-oriented approach to business, they began to engage with the world around them thoughtfully and strategically. They used the new tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — computers and the internet — to their advantage.
Through this approach, Toby and Linda were able to increase their value, productivity, and income simply by designing more competitive offers for this new marketplace. Before long, they were on track to achieve their retirement goals and their worries of not being able to financially care for each other in old age were left in the dust.
Toby and Linda’s journey soon piqued the interest of other ambitious businesspeople around them. They wanted what Linda and Toby worked for — financial security for their families now and 25+ years into retirement. Toby harnessed his business experience and knowledge to develop a new business philosophy – Aji – and curriculum that would enable other serious businesspeople to replicate their results, and The Aji Network was formed.
In 2021, they licensed Toby’s intellectual property to Greg and Roseen Scharnagl, co-owners of The Aji Advantage.