The 97 › Strategy 34 › Week 1
The point
Let me open the programme with the least glamorous strategy I teach, because in thirty-odd years of examining businesses — and I have examined them in more than a thousand industries — nothing produces found money faster, cheaper, or at lower risk.
Nearly every business I have ever looked inside is sitting on three categories of unrecognized wealth: hidden assets it does not think of as assets, overlooked opportunities it walks past every day, and underperforming activities it is already paying full freight for. The ripest of all of them is a list of names you already own.
Not strangers. Not prospects. People who bought from you at least twice — twice, because twice means they liked it — and who then went quiet without anybody on either side ever deciding the relationship was over. You paid to acquire every one of them. You paid again, in service and attention, to earn the second purchase. And then it stopped, for no reason anyone chose.
The reason this goes first is not that it is the largest strategy. It is that it is the fastest, it costs nothing, and the money it produces buys you the patience to do the slower ones properly.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Sending them a campaign. The moment a dormant buyer receives something that was obviously sent to more than one person, you convert a warm silent relationship into a cold dead one — and you cannot go back a second time.
The test: Would this message make sense if it arrived from a friend? If it has a header, an offer and an unsubscribe link, the answer is no.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| The freight operator | Empty trucks on the return leg. The capacity was already bought and paid for; it was being driven home as air. |
| The seminar company | Every unsold seat in a room already rented, already staffed, already catered. Worth full price until the doors open and nothing the moment they do. |
| Norman Rockwell's estate | Reproduction rights sitting unexercised. Jay's example of an asset whose owner had genuinely never thought to ask what else it could do. |
| A dental practice | Patients who moved house and never transferred. Not lost to a competitor — lost to admin. |
| A software business | Trials that expired without a single human ever making contact. The most qualified list in the company, treated as exhaust. |
| A wholesaler | Accounts dormant eighteen months. Nine of thirty replied to a one-paragraph question; four re-ordered inside a fortnight. |
| A training firm | Attendees from three years of events who had never once been asked what happened next. |
| An accountancy | Clients who used one service and were never told the firm did the other four. |
This week
Open your records. Pull everybody who bought at least twice and has not bought in twelve months. Not the ones who complained, not the ones who left loudly — the quiet ones.
Count them. Multiply by what an average one used to spend in a year.
Do not write to them yet. Sit with the figure for a day, because the figure is the lesson.