The 97 › Strategy 7 › Week 2
The point
Somewhere in your business is money that has already left your account and is producing nothing. A trade stand you worked for a day and a half and never followed up. A print run in a cupboard. A licence renewing annually that two people use. A sponsorship whose logo went up and whose list you never asked for.
The trap is hidden in the name. The moment an owner recognizes the money is unrecoverable, he writes the thing off emotionally and stops thinking about it — which is exactly backwards. The spend is gone and there is no value in pretending otherwise. But the asset that money bought is very often still there, fully paid for, entirely unused, and carrying a forward cost of zero.
An asset with a forward cost of zero is an extraordinary thing to own. It can be given away to open a door, traded for something you would otherwise buy, pointed at a market that does earn, or bundled into an offer at no cost to you and real perceived value to a buyer.
And the same arithmetic runs on other people's balance sheets. Every media property on earth ends its cycle with inventory that did not sell — and at the instant the cycle closes it does not become cheaper, it becomes worthless, because it cannot be stored.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Treating the write-off as the end of the thinking. Feeling bad about sunk cost is the most expensive emotion in business, because it is the thing that stops people looking directly at what they still own.
The test: Ask of each line: if a competitor were handed this for free tomorrow, what would they do with it? If the answer is anything at all, you are the one wasting it.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| The failing advertisement | Same creative, same audience, same message — bought on last-minute unsold airtime at 85–90% off card. It became one of the most profitable campaigns the client ever ran. Only the price of reaching people had ever been wrong. |
| Remnant print space | Pages that close empty are worth nothing at midnight. Publishers will take a fraction rather than zero, but only from someone easy to deal with and ready to move. |
| A conference organiser | Unsold exhibitor booths given to complementary businesses in exchange for promotion to their lists. |
| A hotel group | Rooms unsold at 6pm are the purest perishable inventory there is — the whole revenue-management discipline exists because of it. |
| A manufacturer | Machine time between production runs, sold to a non-competing firm that needed short runs. |
| A publisher's back catalogue | Titles fully written, edited and paid for, out of print and earning nothing. |
| An agency's case studies | Work already done and paid for, never turned into the proof that wins the next client. |
| A training library | Recordings made for one cohort, sitting on a drive, costing nothing to serve to the next. |
This week
Write down every asset in your business that has already been paid for and is currently producing nothing. Be unsparing — the office you use three days a week counts.
Then ask one question of three or four suppliers in your market: what do you do with what does not sell?
Most of them have never been asked, and a good number do not have an answer.