A client meeting I won’t forget.
We were a few months into a project to help a well-established client build his email newsletter circulation list. His newsletter had been running for some time, sent to several thousand networking contacts and customers – a carefully accumulated audience that represented years of relationship-building.
I asked him what number he now had on the list.
He turned to me and said something like: “Well, it’s 100 more than you’ve got for me, Richard.”
It turned out he had received advice around the time the new GDPR regulations came into force. The advice was that he should email his entire list and ask everyone to re-subscribe, to keep his business compliant in the new regulatory environment. 100 people took the trouble to re-subscribe. The rest assumed life would carry on as normal and didn’t bother responding.
At this point, my head was in my hands.
“Are you all right Richard?”
“No. Not really,” I mumbled.
I briefly explained the rules on email marketing to businesses. Later, I sent across a copy of the directive from the ICO Information Commissioner’s Office. Thankfully his data was retrievable, retrieved, and quickly reinstated.
But the experience stayed with me. Because it revealed something about how most small businesses think about their data — or, more accurately, how they don’t think about it at all.
The tangible versus intangible problem #
I learned a great deal from that experience. It taught me to recognise how many of us completely underestimate the value of our business data.
The most useful way I have found to illustrate this is a comparison with a tangible asset.
Imagine you have a building, or a piece of vital machinery, and a compliance officer arrives to condemn your prize asset because it doesn’t comply with incoming regulations. You would move heaven and earth to put in place all the necessary precautions to ensure you didn’t need to demolish the building or replace the machine. The thought of losing a physical asset of that value would trigger an immediate, serious response.
But business data? It’s intangible. It’s subliminal. It’s easier to put a torch to.
The problem is precisely its invisibility. We explored this elsewhere in the Hub: the screen that looks the same whether it holds £10 or £10 million of value, the filing cabinet that no longer creaks under the weight of what’s stored on it. What we cannot see, we tend not to protect.
And yet the professional and regulatory world is catching up with what practitioners have long known. In December 2024, the System of National Accounts; the international statistical framework used by the UN, IMF, World Bank, OECD, and Eurostat, made an official decision: data is now to be treated as a productive capital asset, comparable in conceptual status to plant and equipment, software, and intellectual property. Forbes
What the big corporates tell us #
Intangible assets are now responsible for 90% of all business value. That figure — 90%, sits alongside the physical assets on the balance sheet as a reminder of where value lives in the modern economy. Opagio
LinkedIn and WhatsApp were sold in recent years for figures equating to between $30 and $50 per user. The data: the accumulated record of human connections, interactions, and relationships, was partly the asset base being valued and acquired. However, the software could have been rebuilt. The data could not.
Financial markets businesses have changed hands for billions because their data is their lifeblood and their proprietary systems are the heart and arteries through which it flows. Customer lists meet formal intangibility criteria under IFRS 3; they are separable assets, frequently sold, rented, or exchanged between businesses, with the existence of list brokers and data-as-a-service businesses demonstrating clear market separability. Opagio
The regulatory framework that governs data; GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act 2018, implicitly recognises the list as a distinct data asset. The compliance my client accidentally fell foul of was designed to protect something of genuine value. The problem is that nobody had helped him understand that value before the crisis arrived.
What this means for smaller businesses #
It would be unrealistic to value a sole practitioner’s contact list at $30 to $50 per user. The platform effect: the network that makes LinkedIn’s data worth that figure, doesn’t apply in the same way.
But a more modest valuation is still a meaningful one. Is a verified direct email address for a decision-maker worth £5? Is a name, company, role, and generic contact worth £2? The figures will differ for every business. The important thing is to start the exercise; to at least attempt to put a number on the value of the information we use regularly to interact with our audience.
One additional consideration worth noting, drawn from the academic literature on data valuation: data assets often have a compounding useful life: the data becomes more valuable over time as the dataset grows, rather than less valuable through obsolescence. This is the opposite of most intangible assets. Your contact database, properly maintained, cleaned, and enriched, appreciates in value as the relationships it represents deepen and the records within it become more complete. Medium
A building depreciates. A machine depreciates. A well-managed data asset, unlike almost any other asset on the balance sheet, compounds.
The right frame for thinking about data #
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, understood this long before the accounting standards caught up:
“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
And Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, framed the commercial implication directly:
“The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it — is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”
My client’s list, nearly lost to a misapplication of GDPR compliance, was eventually reinstated. But the lesson: the recognition that what sits in a spreadsheet or a CRM system represents something of genuine, quantifiable, and growing value, is worth more than any individual contact record.
Take a moment, at some point soon, to look at your data properly. Not as a list of names, but as a business asset. Consider what it would cost to rebuild it from scratch. Consider what it generates in revenue when it is actively worked. Consider what it might be worth to someone who wanted to acquire your business.
Then protect it accordingly.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
