TL;DR
Economic rent is value you earn not by working harder, but by owning the right assets or utilizing those you have organically. Most organizations (especially nonprofits and social enterprises) are sitting on unclaimed rent every day: from brand equity, data, and proprietary workflows, to simple knowledge others rely on, and heck even tangible property. Let’s help you find it, protect it, and turn it into leverage.
"You'd drive 12 miles to save a dollar?"
I remember standing in a driveway with a friend, debating whether it was worth driving across town to save a few cents per gallon on gas. I asked: "If I gave you a dollar to drive me 6 miles and back, with no other plans, would you do it?"
The look on his face said it all.
What we were really debating wasn’t gas prices—it was economic rent.
The Invisible Lever
Economic rent isn’t about leasing property. It’s about value you collect for simply owning something that can be leveraged with little extra cost; a brand, a system, a location, or even mindshare.
It’s the difference between working and owning the reason others have to work with you.
"Unfair advantages (just like disadvantages) build one on top of another and have a snowballing effect. They don't just add together, they often multiply together. In other words, the more unfair advantages you can stack up in life, and the earlier in life you can develop them, the stronger they will be." — Ash Ali, The Unfair Advantage
But economic rent isn’t always obvious. In fact, many organizations are unknowingly leaking it daily.
Lets look at a real world example with a story you probably haven’t heard.
Tuvalu is a tiny island nation of 11,000 people in the South Pacific. It owns something incredibly valuable: the country code top-level domain .tv.
They didn’t invent online video. They didn’t build a platform. They didn’t invest in tech infrastructure.
They just happened to get the right two letters.
And because of the global rise of video streaming, they now license out .tv for millions of dollars a year, at one point making up 1/12th of their GDP.1
Hidden Rent: Our Work With a Youth Gymnastics Studio
A client of ours, a youth sports and gymnastics studio, was onboarding 30+ seasonal hires every few months. They tracked CPR certs, paperwork, and videos with spreadsheets, sticky notes, and staff memory.
They didn’t realize it, but they were leaking economic rent daily.
All that coordination and tribal knowledge? That was value they should’ve been owning with systems.
We built a lightweight onboarding tool with automatic task nudges and centralized tracking. Suddenly, they owned their process and got back dozens of admin hours per month.
D.I.G. Framework
A simple way to start finding untapped value in your org:
Discover – What do others rely on you for that you've never monetized or formalized? (Think brand trust, insider knowledge, infrastructure, location)
Inventory – List all assets: data, workflows, positioning, licenses, partnerships, team expertise, software, equipment, etc.
Guard – What can you systematize, brand, automate, or gate to maintain ownership?
Economic rent isn’t about manipulation—it’s about fairly capturing the value you've already created.
Data Is Rent. Own It.
I recently attended a luncheon hosted by the nonprofit Help Us Grow2. They showed how simple outcome data (most orgs already have this!) could be structured to tell a powerful fundraising story.
They weren’t just showing results - they were extracting rent from the data they already owned.
So many nonprofits and purpose-driven orgs are sitting on gold. They just haven’t connected the dots.
That’s why we built the SPARQ Framework and DRIVE Diagnostic to help orgs turn what they already have into leverage.
Wrapping Up: Stop Leaking, Start Leveraging
Economic rent isn’t reserved for billion-dollar tech firms or geopolitical accidents, it exists in the trust you’ve earned, the systems you’ve built, and the data you’re sitting on. Whether you’re running a nonprofit, a community project, or a purpose-driven business, you already own assets others would pay to access or that you could be leveraging to save time and money. The only question is: are you capturing the value, or letting it slip away?
Let this be your reminder to look inward before you reach outward. Your leverage is already there. You just need to claim it.
~Jay
One Question for You
Where are you renting consistency or visibility when you could be owning it?
Hit reply and tell me. I might break it down in a future post.
Stay sharp
P.S. Want help uncovering your org’s economic rent? Let’s chat.