“Perhaps a firm’s most valuable unrealized asset class is its insight into things they’re ‘really sick of’ as an organization: chances are, if they’re really sick of them, there are other organizations who are sick of them too.”

There’s another important unmonetized asset class, which very few companies sufficiently capitalize upon, and it’s one that’s closely associated with things ‘they’re really sick of’:

Problems they’ve already solved for themselves.

I’ve noticed most organizations quickly develop a project-mentality instead of a product-mentality. Meaning, they identify a problem in the business, and commission a “project team” to work on it. And the team quickly becomes a coat center, even if they’re reducing cost or increasing revenue in the business.

For example, I have a good friend whose organization developed a bit of a SWAT Team approach to helping under-performing stores improve their NPS score. The team is really successful in helping the organization’s 500+ locations, but they’re just a “project team.”

Why isn’t that project another product? ...

I was talking to a CEO of a very successful confectioner the other day. He was telling me that some big retailers are terrible at providing accurate forecasts. So terrible, in fact that his internal team stopped even paying them any heed, and developed their own (apparently they got “really sick of” that problem enough to do something about it). The offending retailers have even complimented them at their ability to predict demand as a vendor better than they do as a retailer.

Again, why is this internal project not a product they sell to other vendors, or back to the retailers?

Many organizations have such unmonetized assets, that could become new “products” the company launches, mostly with a flip in orientation to a product mindset, led by a particularly entrepreneurial member of the team.

So in addition to the question I mentioned in the aforementioned post, here’s another great one:

“What problems have we already solved exceptionally well for ourselves, that we could be solving for others? Why aren’t we selling this ‘project’ as a ‘product’?”

At the very least, it’s a great way to drop acorns...

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