Hey there!

I learned the lesson behind Dangote's refinery almost 30 years before I had the language to explain it.

Year back...I was selling meat.

And when that business went down, I was left with something I didn't quite appreciate at the time.

I had learned how to sell the meat.

So instead of simply looking for another product to sell, I took what I had learned, turned it into a method and recorded it onto cassette tapes.

Then something interesting happened:

I made more money from selling what I knew about selling meat in one week than I had been making actually selling the meat.

Read that again.

#pausingfordramaticeffect

The meat made me money.
What I knew about selling the meat became an asset.

I didn't understand the distinction then.

I do now.

And watching what is happening with the Dangote Refinery IPO brought it back into sharp focus.

The refinery produces petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and other products.

Those are results.

But Dangote's real wealth doesn't sit in a litre of petrol.

The petrol is gone once somebody burns it.

The extraordinary value sits in owning the productive machinery capable of doing it again tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

The petrol is the result.
The refinery is the asset.

That distinction has followed me through most of my working life.

After those first cassette tapes, I leveraged what I was learning to create my first two personal and business development audio programmes:

The Wisdom of Jesus and Creating Value.

And ultimately that lead to PowerIdeas: a monthly subscription based audio series that I sold back then.

(I have since sold of the audios and now only retain the name PowerIdeas as a trademark, I have a sense I'll beusing it again but I don't know what for)

Anyways....

There was a problem.

I knew how to sell them.

Other people didn't.

For a while, the audio products could barely get up to ₦50,000 a month in sales.

Then I did something that would change everything.

I stopped merely selling the audio and started asking:

What exactly am I doing that makes these things sell?

I began to codify it.

Not just, "Here are the steps."

But:

What am I saying?

What am I looking for?

How am I positioning the product?

How am I having the conversation?

What decisions am I making?

Why does one approach work while another one fails?

Then I trained other people to do it.

Same audio.

Same basic products.

But now there was a method and people who could use the method.

We went from struggling to do ₦50,000 a month to clearing about ₦30 million in a year.

Think about that.

The product itself had not suddenly become hundreds of times better.

What changed was the productive infrastructure around the product.

That taught me another lesson I didn't fully understand at the time:

Sometimes the most valuable asset isn't the product.
It is the system capable of repeatedly producing economic value from the product.

Then people started asking:

"Can you help me create my own information product?"

So I started helping people build audio programmes.

Again, I could have simply kept doing the work personally.

Instead, I began codifying what I was doing.

That eventually gave birth to the High Paid Experts Network.

But even then, my ability to help people never really took off until I did something else:

I codified more of the process and found a vehicle that allowed me to deliver it to many more people.

A Facebook group.

Within about four years, that body of work had produced roughly ₦1 billion in revenue.

Then my ego helped me trash a good thing.

But you already know that story....

It's something about 2019 and a total debt of N1.5billion.

But if you're new to my world....

That is another lesson for another email. 😄

But look at the pattern.

Every major economic leap in my life followed roughly the same sequence:

I produced a result.

I figured out what I was doing.

I codified it.

I found a vehicle for delivering it.

I got other people involved.

The economics changed.

I didn't have the words for it back then.

Today I do.

Produce.
Codify.
Commercialise.
Mobilise.
Multiply.

The Five Moves.

And now, at this stage of my life, I find myself doing it again.

For decades...

I have accumulated the ability to help people clarify what they know,

Improve the results they produce, turn expertise into offers, build intellectual property...

Create communities..

Make money from knowledge and build businesses around outcomes.

A lot of that intelligence has lived inside me.

So now I'm doing what experience has repeatedly taught me to do.

I'm codifying it.

I'm turning it into a body of work called:

The Way of the Tribemaster™.

But you already know that...

The only extra is this:

The ambition this time is bigger than creating another programme that depends upon me delivering it.

I want to train and certify other people to use the Way.

Because the moment someone else can use what I know to help another person produce a result…

something fundamental changes.

It moves from:

Victor can do this.

to:

There is a Way for doing this.

And eventually:

People trained in this Way can do this.

That is the shift from capability towards asset.

Which brings me back to Dangote.

The IPO has made the lesson almost impossible to miss.

The refinery already existed.

It was already producing.

But taking it public allows the market to place an explicit value on the productive machinery itself.

That's the game most experts never learn to play.

They keep selling petrol.

Another consultation.

Another workshop.

Another client.

Another project.

Another launch.

Then Monday comes…

…and they start again.

Nothing wrong with that.

But eventually you have to ask a better question:

What exists because I produced this result that can help produce the next result without requiring me to start from zero?

Is it...

A method?

A diagnostic?

A curriculum?

A case study?

A database?

A decision rule?

A sales system?

A trained person?

A piece of technology?

A community?

An operating system?

Because if every result disappears the moment the work ends, you're making money…

but you may not be accumulating enough productive assets.

And that, for me, is Distinction #1 from the Dangote IPO:

A result proves capability.

An asset captures that capability in a form that can continue producing value.

So here is the question I want you to sit with today:

Are you mainly selling petrol… or are you building refineries?

And perhaps the even better question:

What is one result you already know how to produce that should now become an asset?

Because looking back over my own life, some of my biggest financial leaps did not come when I learned how to work harder.

They came when I learned how to capture what worked.

And I suspect there may be more wealth trapped in what you already know than you realise.

Till tomorrow

Be dangerously useful.

Get out of your own way.

CTM

P.S. If this made you realise that a valuable capability may still be trapped inside you, reply ASSET. I'll show you the first place I'd look to turn it into something that can produce value beyond you.