The Expertise Inventory - What You Actually Know

Most people walk away from a job and forget how much they actually knew. But here's the truth: years of working inside an industry gives you knowledge that can't come from a class, a YouTube video, or a business book. You've lived it. You've seen it firsthand. And that lived experience is worth far more than you think.

Right now, you might be feeling like you've lost everything. The job, the routine, the identity, the paycheck. But here's what you haven't lost: everything you learned along the way. That knowledge is still in your head, and it's the single most valuable asset you have right now.

Let's take stock of what's already there.

What You Know About Your Industry

Think about the years you spent inside your field. You didn't just show up and do a job — you absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge about how things actually work. Not how the textbook says they work. How they actually work.

Here's the kind of insider knowledge you carry:

• How decisions actually get made — not how the org chart says they get made, but who really has the final say. You know the informal power structures. You know which VP's opinion actually matters and which committee is just a rubber stamp.
• What problems keep leaders awake at night and why those problems keep coming back. You've watched the same issues cycle through year after year, watched new leadership try the same failed solutions, and watched the real problems get swept under the rug.
• What solutions have been tried before and why they failed. This is gold. When you've seen three different vendors try to solve the same problem and fail, you understand the problem at a level that no outsider can match.
• What customers say they want versus what they actually need — these are often very different. You've sat through meetings where customers asked for one thing, then watched them struggle because what they really needed was something else entirely.
• Where the money is — who controls the budgets and what they're willing to spend on. You know which departments have discretionary budget and which ones fight for every dollar. You know which problems are "nice to fix" and which ones are "we'll pay anything to fix this."
• What compliance rules, regulations, or standards actually matter versus which ones are just theater. Every industry has regulations that are strictly enforced and regulations that everyone ignores. You know the difference.
• What's changing in the industry right now and what's staying the same. You have a sense of the trends that are real versus the trends that are just conference buzzwords.

Here's something most people miss: this kind of knowledge has a shelf life, and right now, yours is at its freshest. The longer you wait to use it, the more it fades. Industry norms shift. Regulations change. Key players move on. Your insider knowledge is most valuable right now.

What You Know About Your Specific Role

Now zoom in from the industry level to your actual role. Think about what you did every day, every week, every quarter. Think about the problems you solved, the systems you used, the processes you navigated.

• The problems you solved on a daily or weekly basis. These weren't theoretical problems from a case study — they were real, messy, urgent problems that someone needed fixed. And you fixed them.
• The tools and software that actually work versus the ones people just pay for out of habit. You know which CRM is genuinely useful and which one the team hates but keeps using because switching costs are too high. That knowledge is incredibly valuable to businesses evaluating their own tools.
• The broken processes that everyone complained about but nobody ever fixed. Maybe it was the reporting workflow that took 12 hours when it should have taken 2. Maybe it was the approval process that bottlenecked everything. You saw these problems clearly, and you probably had ideas about how to fix them.
• The gaps where something clearly wasn't working and no good solution existed. This is where business opportunities live. Where there's a gap, there's a market.
• What your colleagues consistently struggled with — and what you were often the one to help them with. Pay close attention to this one. If people regularly came to you for help with the same type of problem, that's a strong signal about where your expertise is deepest.

Why This Role-Level Knowledge Matters

Here's a scenario. Let's say you were a senior operations manager at a logistics company for 10 years. You know which warehouse management systems actually work at scale. You know the exact bottlenecks that cause shipping delays during peak season. You know which third-party logistics providers are reliable and which ones will ghost you when things get busy.

A startup founder trying to build a logistics company doesn't know any of that. They're Googling "best WMS software" and reading blog posts written by people who've never managed a warehouse. You could save them six months of expensive mistakes with a single 90-minute conversation. That's the power of role-level expertise.

Or maybe you were an IT project manager at a healthcare system. You know which EHR implementations go smoothly and which ones turn into two-year nightmares. You know the exact change management steps that prevent staff rebellion when new software rolls out. A healthcare startup building a product for hospitals would pay serious money for that insight.

What You Know About Your Customers (Internal or External)

Whether your customers were external clients, internal teams, or some combination, you developed deep insight into what they actually needed. Not what they said in surveys. Not what they put in RFPs. What they actually needed.

• What frustrated them most about the current way things worked. You heard the complaints. You saw the workarounds. You watched them struggle with systems and processes that weren't built for the way they actually worked.
• What their real priorities were — not what they said in meetings, but what they actually talked about afterward. You know the difference between the official priority list and the real priority list.
• What constraints they were working under — budget, time, regulations, politics. You understand the full picture of their decision-making, not just the surface-level version.
• What they would happily pay money to solve versus what they just complained about but tolerated. This distinction is critical for business building. Some problems are annoying but livable. Other problems are so painful that people will pay almost anything to make them go away. You know which is which in your space.

The Insider Advantage Is Real

This isn't generic business knowledge. This is insider knowledge — the kind that outside consultants charge $200 to $400 per hour to provide, and that clients pay because they can't easily find it anywhere else.

Think about that for a second. There are people right now billing $300 an hour for the kind of knowledge that's sitting in your head. The difference between you and them isn't that they know more — it's that they packaged their knowledge into a service and started charging for it. That's it. That's the whole difference.

Here's the honest truth: the average person doesn't realize how valuable their industry experience is until they start having conversations with people outside their company. That's when they realize how much they know that others don't. Things that felt obvious to you — because you lived them every day — are revelations to someone who's never been inside your industry.

This is called the "curse of knowledge." When you know something deeply, it feels basic and obvious. You assume everyone knows it. They don't. What's common knowledge inside your company is premium, high-value expertise to everyone outside of it.

Real-World Example: The "Obvious" Expertise That Built a Business

Sarah was a mid-level procurement manager at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company for 11 years. When she was laid off during a restructuring, she thought her only option was to find another procurement job. She didn't think she had any special knowledge — she just "did her job."

But when she started talking to small and mid-size manufacturers in her network, she was stunned by how little they knew about supplier negotiation, contract terms, and cost optimization. Things she considered basic — like how to structure a multi-year supplier agreement to include price protections, or how to evaluate a supplier's financial stability before signing a contract — were completely foreign to companies without a dedicated procurement team.

She started consulting. Her first client was a $20 million manufacturer who was overpaying their suppliers by an estimated 15% simply because nobody on their team knew how to negotiate effectively. Sarah saved them $300,000 in the first six months. They happily paid her $8,000 a month for the privilege.

Her "obvious" knowledge was worth $96,000 a year from a single client.

Another Example: The IT Manager Who Didn't Know He Was an Expert

David spent 12 years as an IT infrastructure manager at a mid-size financial services company. He managed server migrations, cybersecurity compliance, vendor relationships, and disaster recovery planning. To him, it was just his job.

After his layoff, a friend introduced him to the founder of a growing fintech startup. David sat down for what was supposed to be a casual coffee conversation. Within 20 minutes, the founder was furiously taking notes. David's offhand comments about SOC 2 compliance requirements, which cloud architectures actually held up under regulatory scrutiny, and which security vendors were worth the money versus which ones were overpriced marketing machines — all of this was brand-new information to the founder.

David walked out of that coffee meeting with a $5,000-per-month advisory retainer. The founder later told him: "I was about to spend $200,000 on a security infrastructure that wouldn't have passed our first audit. You saved me from a catastrophic mistake."

David's "ordinary" IT knowledge was extraordinarily valuable to someone building in his space.

Your Exercise: The Expertise Inventory

This is the most important exercise in this entire playbook. Everything that follows builds on what you write down here. Don't skip it. Don't do it in your head. Write it down — on paper, in a document, wherever works for you. But write it out fully.

Set aside 30 quiet minutes and write down the answers to these five prompts. Don't edit yourself. Don't worry about whether your answers are "good enough." Just write.

Prompt 1: What are three problems I solved on a regular basis in my last role?

Be specific. Don't say "I managed projects." Say "I managed the implementation of new software systems for teams of 20-50 people, including change management, training, and troubleshooting." The more specific you are, the more useful this exercise becomes.

Prompt 2: What are three things that frustrated me about my industry that I thought could be done better?

These frustrations are potential business opportunities. If something frustrated you — a professional with years of experience — it's probably frustrating a lot of other people too. And where there's widespread frustration, there's a market for solutions.

Prompt 3: What are three things I was known for being good at — things colleagues or managers specifically came to me for?

Think about the questions people asked you. Think about the problems they brought to your desk. Think about the compliments you got in performance reviews or the skills that showed up in your feedback. This is your reputation — the thing people associated with your name.

Prompt 4: What are three types of people I regularly helped (customers, peers, leadership, vendors, etc.)?

This is about identifying your natural audience. The people you helped most in your career are likely similar to the people you'd serve in a business. If you spent most of your time helping frontline managers navigate complex software, that's a clue. If you spent most of your time helping clients understand regulatory requirements, that's a different clue.

Prompt 5: What are three things that would have made my job easier — tools, processes, resources, or knowledge that didn't exist or weren't available?

This is where you identify gaps in the market. If you wished something existed and it didn't, other people in your role probably wished for the same thing. That gap is a potential product, service, or business.

After You Finish Writing

Look at your answers across all five prompts. You'll start to see patterns. Certain themes will repeat. Certain types of people will keep showing up. Certain problems will overlap across multiple prompts.

Circle the themes that appear more than once. Those are your strongest starting points. Those are the areas where your expertise is deepest, your passion is strongest, and the market need is most likely to be real.

The Expertise Inventory Scoring Method

Once you've completed your five prompts, use this quick scoring system to prioritize your ideas:

For each item you wrote down, rate it on three dimensions (1-5 scale each):

1. Depth — How deeply do I understand this? (1 = surface level, 5 = I could teach a masterclass)
2. Demand — How many people or businesses have this problem? (1 = very niche, 5 = nearly universal in my industry)
3. Desire — How much do I enjoy working on this? (1 = it drains me, 5 = I could do it all day)

Multiply the three scores together. Your highest-scoring items (scores of 60 or above) are your most promising starting points. They represent the intersection of deep expertise, real market demand, and genuine personal interest — the sweet spot for a sustainable business.

These five lists are your business seed. Every business idea you'll explore in this series starts from one of these answers. Don't skip this step. If you do nothing else from this chapter, do this exercise. It takes 30 minutes, and it will fundamentally change how you see your own potential.

A Note on Perfectionism

Some of you are going to stare at these prompts and freeze. You'll think your answers aren't impressive enough. You'll compare yourself to some imaginary person who had a more important-sounding job. You'll wonder if your experience "counts."

It counts. All of it counts. The person who spent 8 years as an administrative assistant at a law firm knows things about legal operations that most people will never learn. The person who spent 15 years as a mid-level marketing manager knows things about customer behavior and campaign strategy that are genuinely valuable. The person who spent 6 years in customer service knows more about what frustrates customers than any market research firm ever will.

Your experience doesn't need to be glamorous to be valuable. It needs to be real. And yours is.

Don't let perfectionism trick you into thinking your experience isn't enough. The exercise doesn't need to be perfect — it needs to be done. You can always refine it later. But you can't refine something you never started.

Key Takeaways:

• Your industry experience gave you insider knowledge that outsiders would pay hundreds of dollars per hour to access
• Most people underestimate how much they know until they start writing it down — the "curse of knowledge" makes your expertise feel obvious to you, but it's not obvious to anyone else
• Your expertise inventory covers three areas: industry knowledge, role-specific skills, and customer understanding
• The five-prompt exercise is the foundation for every business idea in this series — complete it before moving on
• Your insider knowledge has a shelf life — it's most valuable right now, so don't wait to start capturing it