Your Next Growth Opportunity May Already Be Inside Your Business.

What Have You Already Built That You Haven’t Put to Work?

When growth gets harder, the conversation usually turns to what the company needs to add.

A new product. Another salesperson. A bigger marketing budget. A new market to go after.

Sometimes those are the right answers. But before committing to them, there’s another question worth asking:

What have we already built that we haven’t fully put to work?

I’m talking about capabilities customers might value if they were packaged differently, offered to a different buyer, or made available through a better route to market. The company may already have much of what it needs. It just hasn’t connected those pieces commercially.

A tool developed for one customer solves a problem others have. An implementation team keeps doing work that could become a defined offering. A partner has access to the right buyers, but nobody has worked out why their salespeople would bring your product into the conversation.

These opportunities are easy to overlook because they’re familiar. Inside the business, they’re simply part of what you do.

Leading sales at IDC and DataMarket, building partnerships and go-to-market motions at Qlik and ClimaCell, and building Elipsa from the ground up have shaped how I look at a business. Of course, I want to understand the product. I also want to understand how someone buys it, where it fits into their work, and who can credibly bring it to them.

Those questions belong together. A capability can be useful and still be difficult to explain, difficult to buy, or too much effort to adopt. Getting those pieces right is substantial commercial work, even when the underlying technology already exists.

At Elipsa, our work on AI for building operations included a tool for tagging, normalizing, and organizing IoT data from critical equipment. We developed it to support our broader product, but it raised another question: could that capability solve a problem for customers who needed usable data, even if they weren’t looking to replace their existing applications with our intelligent monitoring solutions?

Having the capability gave us a place to start. It didn’t establish demand or tell us how to deliver and price a separate offering. Those were questions we would have needed to test.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere. Consider a software company whose team spends weeks preparing each customer’s data before the product can deliver value. The company may see that work as an implementation cost. But it may also contain a repeatable method, a valuable integration, or a service customers would pay for.

That doesn’t mean the company should launch another product immediately. Does the problem recur? Is the work consistent enough to package? Can someone other than the person who invented it deliver it? Would selling it separately strengthen the business or distract from it?

The possibility is worth examining. The answer still needs evidence.

Relationships deserve the same scrutiny. A company may describe its partner network as an asset, but its value depends on what those relationships actually enable. Access to a decision-maker, credibility in a new market, a missing implementation capability, or a simpler way for a customer to buy can all matter. A logo on a partner page tells you very little about any of them.

When I look across a business, I start with a few practical questions:

• What do customers consistently ask us to help with, including things outside our formal offering?

• What have we learned to do unusually well that we now take for granted?

• Which relationships give us access or credibility we would struggle to build alone?

• Where are we repeatedly creating value without a clear way to charge for it?

• What could we put to work with the people and capacity we actually have?

That last question matters. A long list of possibilities can become another source of distraction. The goal is to find a small number worth testing.

Choose one. Describe the customer, the problem, the capability you would apply, and what the customer would pay for. Then put it in front of people who could buy it. Look for a meaningful next step: access to the budget owner, a paid test, or a commitment of time or resources. Positive feedback is useful, but it isn’t enough to build a business around.

There’s a trap here, too. Just because a company has invested in a capability doesn’t mean it should keep investing in it. Some are costly to maintain, hard to deliver consistently, or no longer relevant to the market. For a bootstrapped or pre-seed company, turning a capability into a new offering can consume limited time and capacity that can’t be easily replaced. A useful review has to make room for a simple conclusion: this opportunity isn’t worth pursuing.

What interests me is the opportunity that stands up to scrutiny: a real customer problem, a capability the company can deliver, and a practical way to connect the two.

That is part of the thinking behind Levrist. Before asking a company to take on more, I want to understand what it already has and whether there’s a better way to put it to work.

What does your company do well that still doesn’t have a clear place in its commercial offering?

If something comes to mind, I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments. You can also get in touch with me directly.

Make moves that matter.