Examples of assets in practice
Asset management assessment is an important step for organizations to take to continue growing. Successful corporations have a solid understanding of their assets and leverage them to reduce cost and effort and increase productivity and profitability. Some companies even manage to turn their assets into products themselves. Consider how these corporations leveraged their assets to grow their businesses.
Amazon
Around 2000, Amazon was looking to launch an e-commerce service for third-party sellers, but the company’s existing IT infrastructure hadn’t been built with that kind of scale in mind. So, Amazon’s engineers embarked on a mission to fix that. In the process, they built an internal set of IT services and found a way to run cost-effective data centers. The company’s executives in time recognized these abilities as a suite of assets that could be packaged and sold to other businesses. Amazon Web Services, a cloud infrastructure service, launched in August 2006.
Disney
Disney is incredible at many things, but perhaps most notably are its abilities to deliver a superior customer experience and train staff to provide consistently pleasant service to guests. These are huge assets, and Disney knows it. So in the mid-1990s, Disney decided to monetize its training program by establishing Disney Institute. Disney Institute offers corporate leadership and customer service training largely based on what its own leaders have learned in the corporation’s nearly 100 years in business.
Netflix
What started out as an alternative to the brick-and-mortar movie rental business, Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007. But it quickly discovered they were earning more than just money from monthly subscriptions in the process. They were also collecting customer data. Netflix recognized it could leverage customer preferences and viewing habits to create original content to appeal to more and more users. Since launching its first major TV series, House of Cards, in 2013, Netflix has expanded its library of original content exponentially and is some of its most popular today.
With these examples in mind, ask yourself how your company could leverage its existing assets to grow its business.