Perry Marshall: Are You Creating Value…Without Becoming Valuable?

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Most entrepreneurs are excellent at creating value for their customers.

You know how to craft a killer USP and then deliver the goods.
You know how to solve any marketing problem you throw at them.
You know how to drive costs down, assemble a crack team, and apply 80/20 to their business and life.

You deliver value, value, value.

But are you yourself becoming valuable? Is your company capturing value in the process?

From what I’ve seen, the answer is “Very rarely”.

Sharp and savvy Planet Perry member, Ed Harycki recently forwarded an article, “Competition is for Losers“, from the Wall Street Journal.

The author, Peter Thiel, nails it when he points out how companies that deliver tremendous value often do a very poor job of capturing that value, or become valuable themselves…

“For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, GOOGL -1.37% which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits—more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year.”

Confession from the hamster wheel: This really hits home with me. I’ve spent the last 10 plus years delivering value to my customers…but not capturing much of that value.

It’s my homework for 2015. How can I capture more of the value I create?

What about you? Are you merely creating value, or are you capturing it as well?