The resource you are about to fund is sitting idle in someone else's business.

TL;DR: When founders hit a growth constraint, capacity, a facility, a crew, they usually inventory only what they own and conclude they have to build it or finance it. But often the resource already exists, sitting half-used inside another company that is quietly eating the cost of it sitting empty. The move isn't to build or borrow money. It's to find the business whose idle asset is your missing piece, and pay for it only out of what the collaboration produces.

A founder hits a wall. Not enough floor space, not enough trucks, not enough people who can do the specialized part of the job. The instinct is almost automatic: price out the build, or go ask a bank for the money to build it.

That instinct only makes sense if you assume the resource doesn't already exist. It often does. Somewhere near you, a company that looks nothing like yours is sitting on exactly the capacity you're trying to fund, and it's half-empty. A factory running under capacity. A truck fleet coming back light at the end of the day. A sales team with more relationships than they have products to sell into them.

U.S. manufacturing gives you a sense of scale here. The Federal Reserve's September G.17 release put manufacturing capacity utilization at 75.7 percent in August, roughly two and a half points below the long-run average. That's a lot of built, paid-for, sitting-idle capacity in one sector alone.

The mistake isn't lack of resourcefulness. It's the frame. Founders inventory their own balance sheet and stop there, as if the only assets available to a business are the ones it already owns.

My co-author on our book, Jay Abraham, used to run trainings for entrepreneurs in China, and one story he tells from those sessions is worth repeating in full. A young motorcycle manufacturer stood up, close to tears, and said the banks wouldn't lend him anything. No loan meant no expansion, no new factories, no salespeople, nothing.

Jay's answer wasn't sympathy. It was a reframe: "You don't need the money. All you have to do is figure out that your problem is the solution to someone else's bigger problem."

A year later the same entrepreneur came back to report what happened when he took that seriously. He'd traveled the region talking to other business owners, not competitors, complementary operators, and found Malaysia's largest lawnmower manufacturer running its factory at reduced capacity. They struck a deal: he supplied the tools and dies, the lawnmower company supplied the factory workers, the salespeople, the offices, and a network of thousands of dealers. No loan, no equity raise, no new building. Within a year of that conversation, the partnership had made ten million dollars.

That's not a story about a lucky break. It's a story about correctly diagnosing where the missing resource actually lives. He didn't have capacity. Somebody else had too much of it and was paying to keep the lights on either way.

You see the same shape at a much bigger scale in Ford and Geely's joint venture at Ford's plant in Valencia, Spain, announced this past summer. Ford fills capacity in a plant with annual capacity of roughly 500,000 vehicles; Geely gets vehicles built inside Europe without building a plant. Direct competitors, on paper. In practice, one side's idle capacity was exactly the other side's missing piece.

Here's what makes this different from a normal deal: the other side isn't doing you a favor. They're covering the cost of that capacity every single month, used or not, and an arrangement that fills it, even at a discount, even for a revenue share instead of cash, beats an empty building.

A chiropractor near a national forest noticed the forest paid crews every year just to haul away fallen pine needles. He turned that into a pine-needle mulch business without spending a dollar of his own. A trucking company with routes past the forest took the needles for a cut of future revenue instead of running back empty. An unoccupied used car lot took a cut for drop-off space it wasn't using. He underbid the incumbent hauler to the National Park Service by half and still cleared three hundred thousand dollars in year one. Every partner in that chain was already paying for the asset he needed. He just found them before he tried to build his own version of it.

The same logic shows up in less obvious forms. A cookie entrepreneur with no suppliers, no distributors, and no brand talked a bakery into producing her product, with equity in the bakery kicking in only once her volume crossed set thresholds, higher volume, bigger stake. The bakery said yes because a bakery with no proprietary product is at the whim of the market, and running someone else's winning recipe for a future slice of ownership beats that. She wasn't asking for a handout. She was solving a problem the bakery already had.

This is the shift: once you notice the other side is already absorbing the cost of the idle resource, the deal stops looking like a favor you're asking for and starts looking like a fix you're offering. That reframes the entire negotiation. You're not the one who needs something. You're the one who showed up with the answer to a cost they were already carrying.

When we work with a founder who's staring down a build-or-finance decision, this is usually the first question we ask: have you actually gone looking for who already has this, or did you go straight to a budget?

Most haven't looked, because looking requires admitting the resource isn't inside your own four walls, which cuts against the instinct that got you this far. The framework we call relational capital in our book treats every unused asset sitting in someone else's business, not just their audience or their customer list, but their floor space, their crew, their equipment, their factory hours, as inventory you have access to before you spend a dollar building your own version of it.

The mechanics vary. Pay per unit produced. A revenue share on what the collaboration generates. Equity that vests only once volume proves the arrangement is worth something to both sides. What doesn't vary is the sequence: find the idle asset, structure the deal so both sides get paid from the upside it creates, and let growth decouple from how much capital sits on your own balance sheet.

The founders who never do this aren't lacking opportunity. They're running an inventory that's too narrow, counting only what they already own and treating everything else as someone else's problem, when it's usually the answer to theirs. The Leverage Scorecard is a fast way to see how much of your own growth still depends on resources you'd have to fund yourself, and where you might already be sitting on the other side of somebody's idle asset, waiting to be asked.

— Roland

What company equity gets you when you bring someone in, and what it doesn't.

Skin in the outcome. A claim on everything the company becomes. Upside that outlives the job it was granted for.

What it doesn't get you: upside tied to what they actually did, or an easy off-ramp if the role changes.

Equity is one instrument. The person building one specific thing is probably better served by synthetic micro-equity scoped to exactly that.

It's about matching the instrument to the role. A clean cap table is optionality.

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