An Entrepreneur's Intangible Property

Knowledge is intangible. Property is tangible. You can sell a company, but you can't sell your knowledge, skill set, or performance history- unless you are doing some kind of consulting gig, but no matter how much knowledge or skills you 'sell', at the end of the day, you still retain rights to them. I hear entrepreneurs all the time say that they want to build up their company and sell it for a multi-million dollar check, but what I don't hear very often is that they want to learn something of TRUE value along the way.

I stated above that 'performance history' stays with an entrepreneur. This means everything from public reputation, to credit history, to even cash flow of your company, if it is public and revenues are known openly. The video below shows how Noah Lehmann-Haupt, sold his first company, but never sold those skills. By learning and retaining the skills he had, he was able to create another profitable company; Gotham Dream Cars (an exotic car rental company). The bottom line is, you can create a great company the first time around by hiring the right people, but if you never extract their knowledge and learn from it, after you sell the company, chances are you won't be able to learn from those knowledgeable employees anymore, which could be a priceless asset.

[Video Here]