How the 24 Assets approach can help you grow your business

We recently re-branded from Candle Learning to Candle Digital, largely due to feedback from our clients. It felt that we weren’t just helping them with learning technology and content solutions, but that we were also assisting them with the discussions and planning required prior to this. In essence, we were helping them figure out how online and digital products could add more value to their clients.

At the same time as re-branding (as if we weren’t busy enough!), we were also re-reading 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley, a book that helps you identify and create valuable assets in your business to make it a lasting success. The ideas in the book struck more of a chord with us than on the first read, perhaps because of the recent changes we’ve made to our business.

Whilst we think many businesses could benefit from the approach advocated in 24 Assets, we think it’s particularly relevant for those in a training, coaching or consultancy capacity.

Many training, coaching and consultancy businesses are selling their time, not their expertise

We see this scenario time and time again. If your income depends solely on your time, you’re missing an opportunity. In 24 Assets, Priestley advocates switching focus from chasing income to building assets, and gives some strong reasons why.

Many training businesses are built around a single person (typically the founder and owner)

Whilst having a founder at the centre of a business can be a big growth driver (see Daniel Priestley’s other book, Key Person of Influence, for his take on this), your business needs to be built in a way so that the role of the founder adds value, rather than making the business more difficult to sell. Much like renovating your house to get a higher price, even if you decide not to sell after all, you’re going to find it much more comfortable to live in anyway!

These businesses are sat on (as Priestley would say) a “mountain of value” that has not yet been turned into usable assets

If you’re getting paid for speaking, training or consultancy gigs, you’ve probably got a wealth of knowledge that’s only in your head. And if it’s only up there, you’re missing the opportunity to turn your expertise into valuable products and services that serve new and existing customers.

Any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Here’s how 24 Assets can help you refine your business approach:

24 Assets provides a robust framework for tackling these issues. Priestley argues that there’s predictability in the development of a business, and there are very few ‘new’ problems that cannot be envisaged or overcome.

We particularly like how he’s distilled the various success factors into different discrete buckets. While this may seem overly simplistic, we think they cover the vast majority of variables that impact on a business’ success. As such, it seems a better template than many to identify future plans from.

One of our biggest challenges as small business owners has been to work out where we focus our efforts. 24 Assets has helped us with this by providing a framework to continually assess our growth against.

We’ve started using the 24 Assets heatmap once a month to look at the assets we’ve created and talk through our progress and future plans. Admittedly, we’ve got a lot we can be working on, but doesn’t every small business with aspirations for growth?

Like the sound of 24 Assets?

You can download the book from the usual suspects or your local independent bookshop. If you do give it a read, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop us an email or send us a Tweet!

Want to grow your business by turning your expertise into digital products? We can help. Let’s start the conversation today.

Andy Jack

Andy loves helping subject experts, authors, speakers, coaches and key persons of influence to monetise their expertise with online learning. When not on his laptop, he'll usually be found up a mountain!