X Marks the Spot
You already own the treasure. You just don’t have the map.
Count what’s behind you right now.
The talk you’ve given so many times you could do it hoarse. Client files going back a decade, every one of them cracked open with the same move you’ve never bothered to name.
A course. A book with your face on it. Worksheets nobody asked for. A process you invented on a long weekend in 2019 for somebody who was drowning, and have run on everyone since without thinking about it.
Somewhere in that pile is an asset worth more than everything you’ll make this year.
You’ve stood on it so long it reads as floor.
Treasure you can’t find is a rumor.
Most experts can feel something down there they’ve never named, and they’ve been giving it away for years.
So they guess. Somebody builds a course and eleven people buy it. Somebody else burns a year and forty grand on the third-best idea they ever had, which from where they’re standing looks the same as their best one.
They worked hard the whole time. Nobody ever knelt down next to them and said, That one. That’s the vein.
There’s a man in a creek. He’s been there with his pan for eleven years and he’s better on that stretch of water than anybody. He has a jar of flakes to show for it.
Two hundred yards up the hill sits the rock that’s been shedding them the entire time. Any working geologist would have found it before lunch.
I go through everything you’ve built and tell you what’s under it.
A few exercises pull up material most people would never think to send me. Then ninety minutes on a call, where I read it back and name what’s in it.
Somebody who knows paintings walks through your house and stops at the one over the couch. You hung it there because it fit the wall.
By the end you’ll know which of it you actually own and what each piece could be sold as. One gets circled, and that’s where your next year goes.
MAP YOUR TERRITORY
Everything comes out on the table. Content, client work, the talks, the wins, the half-finished thing in a folder from 2021. All of it visible at once, probably for the first time.
IDENTIFY VALUE SIGNALS
Some of what you do well is a system. Most of it is competence with your name on it. You can’t sort those from where you’re sitting. I can.
NAME YOUR DISCOVERIES
Nobody can buy, license, or defend a thing without a name. I give your strongest assets names a buyer understands.
EVALUATE COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL
Demand, competition, the paths each one can travel. Then the ranking.
What you walk away with
- 3–5 named IP assets, the methodologies, frameworks and story patterns you’ve been walking past
- A development sequence, what to build first, what to build second, what to leave in the ground
- A revenue architecture, the paths each asset can travel: product, service, licensing, certification, publication
- Positioning language, how to say what you own so people want it
- The full recording of your analysis session
You can feel the value in your work, and from this close everything looks important.
You’ve tried to map your own methods and got about as far as a list.
You can’t afford another year on an idea that was never going to pay.
You’d rather know than guess.
Someone else is packaging your ideas right now.
There’s a person out there with a fraction of your experience and twice your discipline. They half-watched you work once, or they arrived at a rougher version of the same idea on their own, and this month they’re building it into a certification, and a category with their name on the door for the next ten years.
All it took was writing it down first.
Every month you leave it in your head, somebody else builds it.
Your best thinking is either property or a habit, and habits die the day you stop working.
The market hands the category to whoever bothered to dig.
You decide how far you want to take it.
Most people leave X Marks the Spot with three or four assets named and one obvious first move. It’s rarely the same move twice.
Sometimes it’s a book. The kind somebody reads before they meet you, so they show up already sold. I own a company that builds those, and if your map points at a book I’ll walk you over. If the fit’s wrong I’ll introduce you to someone in my network who is perfect for the job.
Sometimes it’s an object. You have a high-ticket offer and a room full of people who need to be impressed rather than informed. What you hand them can’t look like content. It has to land like something that came out of a safe. A print run small enough that owning one says something about them. We make those.
Sometimes the map itself is the product. If what you own turns out to be bigger than any single asset, a connected universe instead of a pile, the next step is The Infinite IP Map ($50,000). Six to eight weeks, and you’ll get the whole architecture of your intellectual property. Every asset connected and every revenue path in order.
And once in a while it’s a decade of work. Two engagements sit above the Map, The X Advisory ($250,000/year) and The Infinite IP Universe Builder (from $2,000,000).
None of that matters yet. First, we find the X.
The exercises, ninety minutes on a call with me, and a map you keep.
This is the front door to an estate you already own.