Found Money: The Unused Assets Every Business Is Sitting On

Most businesses aren't short on assets. They're short on noticing them. The things that already cost money to build tend to fade into the background, and once they're invisible they stop earning.

Here are the usual suspects I look for when I sit down with a business owner: past customers who haven't heard from the business in a year or more; offers that worked once and got shelved; reviews and testimonials nobody uses in marketing; empty appointment slots during a slow part of the week; and the owner's own know-how that has never been turned into a guide, a course or a process.

Put any one of those to work and the result is revenue the business wouldn't have had otherwise. Travis Sago calls it found money, and once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere.

Travis explains why found money is so easy to agree to with a pie. Try to take a crumb of a pie someone is already eating, like their existing ad budget or a slice of their current sales, and they'll guard it. Bake a brand-new pie from ingredients they weren't using, and taking a slice is easy. Nobody loses anything they already had.

This is why partnership offers built on unused assets get a yes so much more often than service proposals. You aren't asking for their money. You're offering to split money that doesn't exist yet.

Go through the list above for one business, yours or someone you know. Circle the asset that would be easiest to put back to work this month.

This is lesson 2 of a free 7-day email series on leveraging digital assets, based on what I've learned from Travis Sago.