24 asset

Summary Of 24 Assets: Create A Digital, Scalable, Valuable And Fun Business That Will Thrive In A Fast Changing World
By Daniel Priestley
Introduction
In every industry, there are businesses that take off. They hire talented people, attract loyal customers, create cool products and make lots of money. These businesses seem to stand out and scale up quickly with the support from investors, partners and the media.
Sadly, most businesses don’t perform this way. Most entrepreneurs aren’t building anything of value. They work hard, make sacrifices, struggle, dream, plan and strive, but in the end, it doesn’t pay off.
Assets are the key. There are 24 assets a business needs to develop to achieve greatness. If you follow the plan in this book and do the work to develop your ecosystem of assets, you’ll be able to build a business that will scale up, solve big and meaningful problems, create tens of thousands of jobs and generate millions of dollars.

Income Follows Assets
Business assets are anything that would bring money your way. A company that owns storage units can easily rent them out to people who need to store things. Someone that owns a truck will earn more money than someone without a truck in a furniture removal business. If a guy owns an apple tree, he will make money selling apples.
Everyone knows that income is linked to the assets when it comes to traditional assets like houses, and they know that the quality of that asset is what determines its price. The house is a business asset. If you rent out your house, you will get rent money. If you own shares in a business asset, you will get a dividend.
The price is linked with the asset, as you grow the quality of your assets, your income will grow. Everyone knows that the value of traditional assets like houses or cars is determined by its quality. The same applies to business assets like shares: a bigger house will sell for a higher price, and if you grow your business asset, your shares will be worth more.
There is a building in central London that has offices for more than a 100 companies. A Lot of them are small, with around five members in one room. A few of them take up a whole floor.
The things these companies do are widely varied. Some of them provide professional services, and some of them manufacture physical products.
Each and every one of these companies have a sales team, young people with a spark who want to impress their leaders so they can move up the corporate ladder. Most of them arrive early and go home late. They drink coffee in the same place and compare notes, but they have very different results and make very different incomes.
Some of them make 50 calls a day so they can give two people a free trial. Others have three meetings a day and get $25,000 in orders. Some get paid $30,000 a year and others get $100,000.
The reason for this variation is simple: income follows assets. A sales person for Gucci will make $500,000 a day while a sales person for a clone company will be happy to get a few meetings a week. A sales person can only showcase the asset. They can't make money from nothing.
A real estate agent can easily sell a three bedroom studio apartment in Manhattan, New York, for $3 million. The same guy will find it very difficult to sell the same apartment at a fraction of the price in the middle of the Arizona desert. The higher price is related to the property being in Manhattan and not in the middle of the desert. How skillful the sales guy is has little to do with the matter.
A lot of people don't see the importance of digital presence on the value of an asset. A sales person that works for a respectable brand that is recognizable will make a lot more than someone that works for a startup that no one knows. If a company has a beautiful video to present the products, a youtube channel, or a website, that will make it look more legit, and it will make a lot more money than a company that does not invest in digital presence.
Tools like websites are called soft digital assets. Nowadays they define income even more than physical assets like properties and factories. An empty restaurant will be full if it was taken by a famous chef. More people will be aware of it, that will increase the value of the asset, which will bring in more money. In the same way, A finance firm will have a waiting list if the CEO wrote a best selling book. Anything that makes people more aware of you is a soft asset.
An asset is anything that makes you money. The only way you can increase your income is by increasing the value of your assets. Having a digital presence will add to the value of your brand, and it will make your assets worth more.

Intellectual Property Assets
Nowadays, the fastest growing businesses are based on Intellectual property assets. These are ideas that have been developed by a business and are legally protected like: pictures, text, video and audio files, code, algorithms.
Mark Zuckerberg became one of the top 10 richest people at the age of 30 because of his ideas on how people can communicate online. All of his assets are intangible: users data, algorithms, trademarks and other digital assets, which when combined together make up Facebook.
These assets hold a value because they carry the unique pattern of your business. If one of your employees copies and pastes the data of these assets, he pretty much got your whole business. They are also extremely scalable because of the nature of the digital universe.
Everyone already has a huge amount of intellectual property. We all have different perspectives, interesting stories and a unique journey that can be transformed into intellectual assets in three ways: content, methodologies and registered IP.
Content such as text, images and videos, is the king of the digitale world today. The content you make gives you a unique fingerprint and gets people to know your business.
Content makes your thinking clear. When you are making a video or writing an article, you focus on what you want to share and what you want your audience to think about you.
Content is easily scalable. Just a few years ago, if you wanted to publish a book, you needed a publisher to distribute it. If you recorded a video, you needed a contract with a tv station. Today, you can upload anything you want in seconds for free for a global audience.
Content is almost free to produce. All you need is a phone and you can be a writer, a photographer, a video editor and any other kind of creator you want to be. Not so long ago only large businesses even dared to produce content because of how expansive it used to be.
As you keep creating content, a methodology will develop. A methodology, in a business context is the way of getting the outcome you want. Google’s search algorithm for example is a methodology that billions use everyday. They visit google to use its methodology of finding data. They don't know how it works, but they don't care as long as it gives them the outcome they want.
A good methodology is a reason for the audience to engage with your business. Your methodology can be made into a poster using graphs, images and algorithms where people can learn how it works and repeat it. Sometimes, your methodology can be developed into a software that repeats it automatically.
Before you can think of your intellectual properties as business assets, you need to be able to defend them legally. Your intellectual properties need to be documented and registered so you can say that they are yours in the court of law. That includes registering your business name as a trademark that is recognized by the government. It also includes registering URLs and social media profiles. Even if your business doesn't use social media like Instagram and Twitter now, it is worth signing up and making a basic profile for your business so no one will impersonate you. You may decide to use them later.
To Register an IP or an Intellectual Property you need to partner with a third party company that will help you keep track of it and help you defend it. At an advanced stage, you will need to file patents and register your produced names and slogans and designs as trademarks.
The fastest growing businesses today are based on ideas that have been developed by the business and are legally protected. They scale rapidly because of the low cost of growing their Intellectual Property assets.

Brand Assets
The most known brand in a market can charge six to seven times more for its products than the second best known brand for almost the same products and services. Having a good brand increases the value of your assets because customers always look for why you are known, liked, and trusted. They will happily pay more for the added reliability. Having a good brand will also help you scale because it shows that you are a professional and that you are ready for business.
In today's world, thanks to the internet, we have access to a global market. This means having the ability to choose any product you want. Because of that, a countless amount of unethical suppliers has emerged in every industry. Trusting the brand has become more valuable than ever.
A Swiss Army Knife will sell for around $50, where a similar pocket knife with the same functionality and manufacturing quality will sell for $10. Underwear from Calvin Klein will cost you $25, and an identical product without a brand will cost $5. An apple IPad will cost you $400 where an android tablet with better performance will cost $80.
To build a trusted brand asset, you will need to focus on the philosophy, the identity, and the ambassador of the brand.
Every great brand is based on a great philosophy. The philosophy is the vision and the values of the company, which sets the priorities and helps to pick the right decision.
Miicrosot had a vision to put a PC in every house and office in the world. Almost every decision in the first 25 years of the company was made to make that vision a reality. That great vision combined with great employees made Microsoft one of the greatest companies today.
Companies with values and goals end up with the best employees, the most loyal customers and the least bad decisions. People can see what you will become as a brand, and if they like your philosophy, they will help you get there.
The identity of the brand is how it looks, feels, sounds, and tastes in the customer’s minds. If your brand doesn't change its identity and consistently behaves in a way they like, they will trust you and continue to support you.
Being consistent is in a way more important for the customers than the behavior itself. Some brands can get away with some stuff because that's what they always have done and that's what they will keep doing.
Apple, for example, can charge people more for the charger that is usually free because that's what they do, while samsung would not get away with that because their customers don't expect them to do that.
The ambassador is the face of your brand. Your customers will associate the trust, fame, likability of the ambassador to the brand he is representing.
In 1975, Nestle was a small company focusing on coffee machines systems for the office. For years, the company grew slowly, gaining one customer at a time by sending their sales agents into offices to explain how the machine works.
In 2005, Nestle wanted to make their coffee machine a global product. They decided to make it a home machine that is simple to use for the whole family, instead of the boring complicated office machine.
They made George Clooney the face of that product. A trustworthy proud American that lived by a lake in Italy was the perfect ambassador to connect the brand with the coffee culture of the American family.
Because of George Clooney, Nestle grew rapidly, and that coffee machine became the leading brand in less than a decade.
Having a good brand will help you scale because it shows that you are a professional and that you are ready for business.

Market Assets
Having control over the market is a great asset for the business. The only problem is the market is not even real.
The market is what sellers visualize customers as. If you are selling seeds, you will imagine a market full of farmers.
Customers don't see themselves as part of a market. They are individuals who want to buy stuff they need or want. All they care about is buying from a brand they like and trust.
The companies that actually control the market are the ones who don’t even imagine a market with a large amount of customers that want to buy something. They know that their buyers are individuals with specific unique desires and they try to perfectly match their needs.
Controlling the market will allow you to communicate, sell and spread your ideas to the right people quickly and at a lower cost than your competitors. The assets you need to control the market are: positioning, channels and data.
Positioning is the actions you take to influence your customers' awareness of your brand and your opponents brand. Your goal is to take a unique, clear and strong position in the minds of your customers.
Your position in the market is based on five key questions that customers ask before they buy stuff: Who has the best quality products? Who is the most affordable or the cheapest? Who is the closest to the customer or delivers rapidly? Who is the most reliable? And who has the best customer service?
A channel is the way you distribute your products and services to reach your customers.
Michelle Mone has a makeup business that she started from nothing. She dreamed of getting the products she developed into the hands of millions of women. She found out who is already controlling that market. Then she moved out of her small town to central London, so she could beg the management office of Selfridges to spread her products to their buyers of women products.
After Michelle succeeded in getting a contract with Selfridges, she thought about how to get her brand to reach the women that would purchase her products. She started a huge marketing campaign, where she got men dressed as cosmetic surgeons claiming that they would go out of business because of Michelle’s products.
That controversial marketing campaign got national newspapers and magazines to talk about her bold claims, which made her brand known to millions of women who fell in love with her product.
A few years later, Michelle Mone gained over $1 billion of free publicity and millions of social media followers. With that amount of channels that spread her word, she has launched multiple products and services without needing to ask for anyone's help or permission.
Data is the key to having a relationship with someone. If you have a strong data collection system, you can create a personal relationship with millions of customers.
Daniel was looking out of the plane's window waiting for it to take off, when a smiley Cabin Crew Assistant approached him and said “Hello Mr Daniel, thank you for flying with us again. Would you like to move to an aisle seat, as you usually prefer to sit on the aisle?”.
He was extremely surprised by that question. When he was checking in, all of the aisle seats were taken, and when an aisle seat became available, the Cabin Crew Assistant somehow knew his preference. British Airways has over 50 million passengers a year, so how did they manage to know where that one guy wanted to sit?
It turned out that they have a software called “Know me” which is a data collection system that is designed to show the wants and needs of frequent customers. The more you travel with British Airways, the more they know about you, the more they can make the service delightful and personal, and the more those customers come back and tell their friend to do the same.
Your goal is to take a unique, clear and strong position in the minds of your customers, have the channels that allow your message to reach them, and have the right ambassador to communicate that message. That will make you always be their first choice.

Product Assets
People think of a product as being a physical item with some packaging like a Phone in its box. That view ignores what gives the product its actual value. A product is more than its physical components, it is a replaceable and consistent way to give your customer what he wants.
What makes a bottle of champagne worth five times more than a normal bottle of wine is not the bottle, the label, the bubbles or the taste. Despite the different production methods, only a few people can actually tell which one is which in a blind tasting test. A big part of Champagne’s value is that it is something people buy in special celebrations, unlike wine which they simply drink with a meal.
A lot of people don't understand why a Hermes handbag is worth $10,000 more than a Louis Vutton bag. To most people, there is no difference between the two in terms of production quality and design. But the person that has a few Louis Vutton bags keeps imagining herself casually using her $10,000 Hermes bag to show off in front of her friends.
A big part of the product's value comes from its non-physical elements: the identity of the brand, the rarity of the product, the way people will react to you using it and the social status it will give you. There are a few nuanced rules you need to follow to create a successful product
The naming of the product is extremely important: The Air Jordan, the iPad, the X5. Your product needs to have a distinctive name that reflects its elements.
A product is a complex package of smaller products. Many suppliers come together to make your product a reality. The more complex the package is, the more valuable it is. A Porsha car has more than 2,500 parts from different suppliers. They are packaged together in an elegant product that looks to be one complex thing.
Even if the product is non-physical, it becomes a product when it can be reproduced and duplicated. The play of Romeo and Juliet follows the same direction, story and delivery every time, and you will get the same experience in New York, London, Sydney. The cast can change, but the product is still there.
When you take both the physical and non-physical elements of the product, and sum them up in a web page, you will have a document that defines the product. Every product should have a web page that explains its value.
Having one product is not enough to have a successful business. You will need to have an ecosystem of products. When you buy an IPhone, you will need to buy the IBuds because they work best with the IPhone. When you want to buy a laptop, you will have to get the Mac Book because you already have the IPhone and the IBuds. Great businesses have an ecosystem with at least four types of product, and a range of free or low cost options to get you started in the ecosystem easely.

Systems Assets
A system is a simple, repeatable and predictable set of steps that always gets the same result. Successful businesses do not run into unnecessary problems often because if there is a system to get a result, they repeat that system over and over again.
Systems come in the form of an operation manual document, a spreadsheet, a to-do list that simplifies big jobs into small steps, or a software that automates that system.
A system can also be a video that trains your employees, an animation that explains a complicated idea, or documents that help your customers solve common problems themselves.
Amazon is a prime example of a business that has automated most of its systems and minimize the need of human oversight. One click payment, affiliate URLs, and Alexa the text to speech system that always listens to you for clues on what you may want to buy are all marketing systems that made Jeff Bezos one of the richest men ever.
Amazon also has the fastest delivery system in the market, which makes them the first choice for most people. Thanks to the automated warehouses with claws and robots moving the products around, your orders will arrive in under 24 hours.
To be the leading business in the market, you will need to have a strong sales system. You will need a system that makes your words reach the right customers. You can rely on a targeted marketing system that uses Facebook ads, SEO optimisation, or Google ads.
Focusing too much on management can destroy a team and it will not add any value to your business. If a sales agent spends a day every week writing a report about his result to show to his manager so he gets paid, it is a waste of time for everyone and it will cost the company. You need to have a system that makes it easy to receive payment from clients, pay suppliers, file taxes, or for team members and employees to communicate.
Great businesses do not run into unnecessary problems often because if there is a system to get a result, they repeat that system over and over again.

Culture Assets
The culture is made up of the values and the vision of your business. To scale your business, your culture needs to be documented and easy to explain to new team members.
As a small business, you won't be able to attract the most skilled people in the industry. So you need to start with passionate young people and train them and help them develop their skills. You will need someone to train those people because you can attract an endless amount of them. And you will need to keep up with managing your expanding team.
As your team keeps growing, things will keep getting more and more complex. In a team of 50 people, relationships will start to form between team members. People will start hating each other. Your employees are humans after all, you must regularly have meetings to remind them of your culture, and let off anyone that doesn't want to comply.
You will know that you have succeeded when your culture attracts, retains and develops people who are even better than you.
The leaders are the most influencing people in your business. Employees will not follow a culture that the people who wrote doesn’t follow. The leaders need to inspire the employees and represent the brand in the best way possible. That will help attract the best players in the industry and will make the business grow faster.
A way you can attract great clients and employees is by writing and publishing a book. Sir Richard Branson said that his new business book was written as a documentation of his culture, it was read by over 100,000 people, and it attracted some great new team members.
The goal for every business is to solve a problem for its customers. And to do that, it needs skilled technical people to solve those problems. A hair salon needs a hairdresser, a software company needs developers and a dental clinic needs a doctor.
Technical people are the ones who build your product and deliver your services. A guy driving using Google Maps will never meet the developers who build it, but they will judge Google on how their product will work. If Google doesn't have good technical people, their product will get worse, and the position of the whole company will suffer.
Being able to retain, attract and develop highly skilled employees without paying them above average means that you have a great business culture. No one will quit his high paying job for a lower paying job in your team unless they agree with the values of your business and see what it can become in the future.

Funding Assets
Fundings are the way you can access money so you can develop your assets. If you have assets that the investors like, finding funding will be easy. When you are buying a house, the bank will ask you for income documents, pay spills from your employer, and an inspection from a builder. If you can show them all the documents they want, they will happily lend you the money to buy the house. The same applies for your business assets like shares, contracts or factories. Investors want to see the documents that prove that the asset is valuable.
Startups don't show the right documentation to the investors and they wonder why they are not getting funding. They show a business plan they wrote themselves, an evaluation they came up with randomly and a powerpoint presentation about their plans for the future.
If you want your business to be able to access funding and your assets to convince the investors, you will need to have the right documents of the business plan and the evaluation.
The business plan is what defines where the business is heading, the challengers it will need to face, and the opportunities it will develop. To convince the investors, you will need to commission a reputable firm to make your business plan. That way it would look like a professional has made it. It is like if you made your own house plan instead of hiring an engineer, other engineers will immediately recognize that it was not made by a professional.
Large companies pay thousands of dollars to get reputable firms like Boston Consulting to create their business plans. It is not because they can’t do it themselves, but because investors trust a stamp from a respected firm.
Not having an evaluation will lower the value of your business. A business had their evaluation at $2 million. When they were asked about how they came up with that, they said that they wanted $200,000 in investments, so they wished to atleast get 10% of the evaluation they made up on the spot.
There are multiple ways you can identify your company's evaluation like future cash flow, the likely sales price minus the discounts, growth chart of similar business, the cost of rebuilding the company and so on. The reality is, the company evaluation is whatever people are willing to pay for it.
The best way to make an evaluation is to list your business publicly. The stocks will be valued moment by moment. Because you are publicly listed, you will achieve higher evaluation than private companies because investors will see you as less risky and trustworthy.

Conclusion
In this book, Daniel Priestley teaches you about the 24 assets a business needs to develop an ecosystem of value that produces scale, robustness and enjoyment.
First, you learned that an asset is anything that makes you money. The only way you can increase your income is by increasing the value of your assets. Having a digital presence will add to the value of your brand, and it will make your assets worth more.
Second, you learned about the intellectual property assets, which are ideas that have been developed by the business and are legally protected. The fastest growing businesses today are based on Intellectual property assets. They are extremely scalable because of the nature of the digital universe.
Third, you learned how to build a trusted brand and the powers that come with it. The leading brand in the market can charge six times more than the second brand for the same product.
Fourth, you learned about how controlling the market will allow you to communicate, sell and spread your ideas to the right people quickly and at a lower cost than your competitors. Your goal is to take a unique, clear and strong position in the minds of your customers so you would always be their first choice.
Fifth, you learned that the true value of the product doesn't only come from its physical value, but from the social status it will give you. your product is a complex package of smaller products that many suppliers come together to make it a reality.
Sixth, you learned that successful businesses do not run into unnecessary problems often because if there is a system to get a result, they repeat that system over and over again.
Seventh, you learned that no one will quit his high paying job for a lower paying job in your team unless they agree with the values of your business and see what it can become in the future.
Finally, you learned that if you want your business to be able to access funding, your assets have to convince the investors.
After you follow the plan in this book, you will be able to develop an ecosystem of assets that will make you able to build a business that will scale up, solve big and meaningful problems, create tens of thousands of jobs and generate millions in revenue.

Why Should You Read This Summary?
Are you seeing these companies that seem to take off without any difficulties and wonder what their secret is?
Do you feel like your word is not reaching the right people, and customers are not aware of your brand?
Are you not able to retain, attract and develop highly skilled employees without paying them above average?
Is your business not able to access funding and your assets are not convincing the investors?
In this book, the author Daniel Priestley will teach you about how income and value are linked. You will learn about the importance of intellectual properties, and how your brand affects your ability to scale and get funding.
You will also learn how to control the market so you can communicate, sell and spread your ideas to the right people quickly. And how you can create a culture that attracts, retains and develops people who are even better than you.

Who Should Read This Summary?
This summary is for:
CEOs
Entrepreneurs
Managers
Team leaders

About The Author
Daniel Priestley is an entrepreneur and best-selling author. He started his first company at age 21 and became a multi millionaire by age 25.
In 2010, Daniel co-founded a business accelerator, which has helped thousands of companies to stand out and scale up.
He also helped to raise millions of dollars of investment funding for ventures and hundreds of thousands for charities.