umm, excuse me… you’re sitting on a goldmine.

I define the fundamental essence of business as this:

Connecting low yield solutions to a high yield problems.

In simpler terms, find something that is cheap or undervalued and connect it to a market that will pay enough for it for you to cover your cost of goods, your operating expenses, and anything else related to the process and still leave you with enough left over to make you happy.

Here’s a thought I’d like you to ponder…

Do you know something that other people don’t know?

Knowing something that the majority of other people don’t know means that, by definition, you are in possession of a low yield intellectual asset. Intellectual property is the very best type of product in my opinion – there’s no physical product, nothing to produce, nothing to support, nothing to break, nothing to ship.

People often overlook the incredible goldmine they are sitting on with the things they’ve been able to figure out on their journey of life so far. I’m not necessarily talking about genius ideas either.

A classic example of this are musicians. They’ve generally grown up loving what they do, and because their definition of “work” is “something that I don’t love to do but get paid for” they fail to recognize the value of the intellectual property they’ve amassed over the years of learning and playing their instrument.

Another good example was a smash-and-grab business opp I capitalized on a few years back. I heard the eBay were doing a Microsoft Cashback program where, basically, Microsoft would pay up to 30% back on any eBay purchase if you searched for the item using the MSN search engine (now Bing.com are doing the same thing). I realized that the promotion, designed to boost traffic through MSN, had been very poorly marketed and most people didn’t know about it. I knew about something valuable that other people didn’t know.

To capitalize on it I created a dead simple 1 page PDF document with instructions on how to take advantage of the offer and began selling copies of the document of eBay itself for $5 a piece (the place where people go to look for bargains… So it made sense that this would be a good marketplace for selling something like this). Long story short, in 30 days I sold 120 copies of this little PDF that I created. That’s $600… and 120 positive feedbacks to my eBay account.

In the position I was in at the start most people would have stopped at thinking about how that information is useful to them. I went a step further and thought about its value to others.

Knowing something others don’t = Intellectual asset.

Intellectual asset + A market for what you know + A means to connect to the market = Your first business.

We make it harder than it needs to be… Branson started out Virgin because he knew a way to get cheap records into Great Britain. Look at where that ended up.