I have always spoken about “riding the elephant ” a philosophy which is extremely useful when you are a small player trying to get into a new market.

Sometimes you have a  reverse scenario.  You have something “deep ” in the market. It could be relationships withkey customers, some typically solutions which only you have, or a place in a specific location.

I remember there was a time about 20 years back, when the company I used to work for used to do trainings for internal staff. So there were multiple training rooms. These training rooms had servers, individual desktops etc.with individual network connectivity.

Many a times, these training rooms used to be vacant. Since we had already spent capital in setting up these class rooms, if left vacant, they were only getting wasted. At that time we were going through a crunch and had to figure out what other possibilities existed for making profits.

So we went about figuring out who else could need training rooms with the specifications that we had. Necessity is the mother of invention. To utilize the asset we had, we now needed to find a buyer who would use the asset only at times when we didn’t use it.

Jay Abraham is a master at building and utilizing these kind of assets. I used the strategies he lists in his book to figure out how we could leverage. We figured that companies could use these rooms, but not everyone needed the individual computers, so those companies were not willing to pay a worthwhile amount. Then we thought of software companies who need to get trainings done both for their staff and customers.

That was the master stroke. Once we could get a handle of who owned customer trainings in these companies, we showed them the rooms and to top it we offered to take care of 2 meals and tea/coffee during the sessions.

It became so good that some of the people who came for the training then asked us about our primary business and we ended up making some of them, our customers for the main business as well.

This was pure profit because the asset had already been paid for, so increasing the utilization only increased the profits.

Till next time then….leverage on what you have and count the gains

Carpe Diem!!!