The trouble with building physical assets, like post offices, sorting offices, railway stations, hospitals, retail stores or even software platforms is that sooner or later somebody decides that its easier (and in their immediate term, more profitable) to sell the assets than to run the service they were built to hold.

Not long after, the service disappears.

If you’d rather that didn’t happen to your business, you can do at least two things:

1) Turn the service into an asset in its own right. Make it profitable, to deter anyone from stripping out the physical assets it depends on. Make it replicable so it can grow with your market. Make it evolvable so it can adapt to new markets.

2) Ensure all those assets stay in the hands of the people who are most motivated to keep the business going – the people who work in it.