About a year and a half ago I read this book titled, “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got” by Jay Abraham. He’s one of those guys who charges $10,000 to talk to someone on the phone and you may see his name in more than a few 30 page sales letters. So what, the book had a damn good lesson.

Whether you make $20,000 a year or $20,000,000 there are assets you are underutilizing. Those assets include, but aren’t limited to, traffic, skills, knowledge, personal contacts, and capital ($$$).

This is one of the big reasons why hedge fund managers and wealthy investors can single handedly add billions of dollars of value on to a company in a matter of a few short years or less. Eddie Lampert moved a few things around at a struggling Kmart, turning the company around. Nelson Peltz invests in companies with strong, but underperforming, brands and pushes them to perform (good article in this April 2007′s Fortune.)

As a web site owner this means a little extra effort can have a big impact on your bottom line. A high traffic domain may be earning a fraction of its potential because the owner is monetizing it only with poorly placed Adsense ads. An hour of work could quadruple the owner’s daily profit. Thats an unrealized value goldmine.

Something as simple as adding an e-mail sign up box could allow a site owner to build a list of tens of thousands of people interested in a particular niche. On the flip side, someone with no web site and free organic traffic may have to pay several dollars per e-mail address to build that list themselves.

When you have an asset it means that going from point A to point B is shorter for you than a person without that asset. Sometimes its as simple as a 15 minute task (adding an email collection form.) Perhaps you do not have the time or knowledge to do anything with those email addresses — then partner with someone who can.

Instead of shutting a business down and struggling to start something completely new a hard look at what you have now. Sometimes it may only take a day of work to go from red to black.