The rise of the sharing economy: How your company can make money using other people’s stuff!

They say money is out there waiting to be caught, you just need to look for it in the right spot. That spot could be sitting in front of you right now.

Everywhere you look there are UNUSED or UNDERUSED resources waiting to be turned into profit. These unused and underused resources create something I’ll be referring to as excess capacity. Excess capacity occurs when the use of a good is less than the amount that is achievable at maximum or optimal usage, thus leaving potential value over the table. That is why, there are multiple potential untapped sources of value in excess capacity.

Let’s do a quick example to put the concept into a relatable context. Think about your house and everything in it. Now think about potential sources of excess capacity. For the sake of the analogy let’s do a basic assumption: you are out of your house for 8-10 hours while you are at work. What could be those things that you stop using during this time period, that could be potentially turned into profit? In my case I can think about a couple: The internet plan that I do not use during the day, that I could be potentially sub-renting to my entrepreneur neighbors, the two garage spots that remain empty during the day that I could be renting to somebody at the adjacent office building, the empty room from my brother that already left my parent’s house, among many more.

Several Unicorns (Companies valued at more than USD 1 BILLION) have tapped sources of value found in excess capacity. Airbnb makes profit out of your unused room or property, Uber makes profit out of your underused car, and startups like Parking panda are making profit out of your underused house garage or parking spot. These are just some of the examples of venture opportunities found in excess capacity, but they can be found EVERYWHERE and in ANY industry.

Presently with Autolab, tech enabled car repairing chain for the middle income class in Latin America (From company builder Polymath Ventures) that is exactly what my task has been while co-designing the MVP as product manager for B2B products. Our complete digital experience has been a game changer in many ways, including customer acquisition. We have experienced explosive growth over the past years and one of our next inquiries is how to scale the ops at the same rhythm.

Truth is, having fair priced brick and mortar car repairing shops is a good business, but is it is heavily capital intensive to quickly replicate and scale through Latin America, as it is our goal to do so.

A question that came into our minds in the leading team was: How can we grow and scale our business without the heavy cost of it?

The answer was literally in front of us: by cooperating with other car shops that had excess capacity surrounding our main shop, while doubling our marketing efforts. During the past three months we have had very exciting results that have turned our first MVP into a strategic business unit for the company. We have around 10 fully operating allied shops, last month our MVP accounted for 50% of total company revenues while achieving an average 40% gross margin. Not bad at all for an MVP! All of this without investing a penny in bricks or equipment.

In conclusion, these are just some of the examples of how there are untapped sources of value in excess capacity, and how your day to day resources could potentially fuel the next multimillion dollar start up, all you have to do is look around with sharp eye!

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