What value are you not capturing from the work you create?

In business, there’s creating value and capturing value.

The former was always my strong suit. Inventing new things, building efficient processes for doing so, expanding my body of work, building my brand as an entrepreneur, easy peasy lemon squeasy. Creating value plays to my strengths.

However capturing value, that is, productizing ideas into sellable offerings, monetizing my users into profit centers and growing equity in something that generated recurring revenue without my direct involvement, that wasn’t so easy for me.

Capturing value was always sporadic, and my enterprise had mostly episodic earnings.

Now, part me feels shameful about this approach, as running a business is exhausting and unsustainable when you disproportionally create value without capturing it. Imagine a farmer who spends all his time planting and growing delicious crops, but only harvests and sells a small percentage of them.

That was me. God, it’s actually quite embarrassing to thinking back to my twenties and thirties.

Scott, how the hell did your business survive for so long? What were you even doing all those years?

Great question. Not sure there’s an answer. But as compassion training has taught me, prosecuting ourselves for crimes past doesn’t help or heal us. We have to forgive ourselves for being who we are and who we were, in order to evolve into who we will be.

Anyway, it’s true that a brand has to create value before they can capture it. That’s step one. But eventually, the ratio must tilt towards the business’s ability to create profit from its transactions.

Laney’s profound book on infonomics teaches companies how to generate higher levels of value from their data assets. His philosophy was a paradigm shifter for me. He writes:

Even if your information won’t ever become as valuable as your existing products or services, it is unconscionable to forgo an opportunity to monetize it in one or more ways. Information is worth big money, and those who don’t exploit its value are leaving valuable resources on the table. In raw form, it may not be immediately usable. But sitting idly in your databases, it’s of no benefit to anyone else whatsoever.

What value are you not capturing from the work you create?

And don’t feel guilty, you’re not alone. Most organizations limit the economic potential of their information assets in some way. The key is thinking extramurally. Getting outside the four walls of the company and economically availing your information to the marketplace.

For starters, here are a few strategic questions to ask your team.

*What does your company have that people want or crave, but you’ve been giving away all these years?

*What captured data, that’s not particularly useful in the context of your business, may be financially beneficial to others?

*What wealth of public information, when juxtaposed with yours, could yield monumental monetization opportunities?

Once you’ve answered those questions and identified various points of leverage, the next step is packaging your information in various ways to appeal to different markets and users. Architecting the parts to make it understandable in a way that gets you to your goals.

That process is complicated and nuanced, but the overriding theme is as follows.

You don’t have to tell anyone anything they don’t already know. All you have to do is capture insights, intuitions, patterns and learnings and put them into a coherent set of tools that can be used for future decision making.

Figure out how to do that, and you won’t just create value, you’ll capture it.

What treasured warehouse of data is nobody building?