Intellectual property is one of the three wealth engines, and one you build without spending a dollar.
It can grow in value, it can pay you every month, and it gets better tax treatment than a paycheck (saving up to 15.3 percent).
Your financial advisor skips it for one reason. There is no product to sell you and no fee to collect on it.
People ask what real estate I own. My real estate is my 10 books, with an 11th on the way. There are no tenants with a book, and no maintenance at night.
You can turn what you already know into a book, a course, or a body of work that keeps creating value. Here’s how to find your IP DNA, choose a format you enjoy, and fund the first version before you build it.
Why Will A Financial Advisor Never Mention Intellectual Property?
Because they get paid on assets under management, and your book is under nobody’s management.
Your course or workbook isn’t on a platform they can wrap a fee around. Your clients, your community, pay you directly.
Follow the incentive and the silence makes sense. Nothing in the conversation pays them, so the conversation never happens.
What Makes Intellectual Property A Wealth Engine?
It passes the same three part test as a business or a building. Intellectual property means the books, courses, videos, tools and communities you create from what you know. It has growth, cash flow and tax efficiency all at once.
Growth.
A body of work appreciates. Killing Sacred Cows came out in 2008 and still sells. A decade later I got an advance on the audiobook.
Four of my books sit in the Amazon top 100 of their categories right now.
With What Would the Rockefellers Do? in the top 10 in three categories.
Cash flow.
A royalty is the slice of every sale that comes back to the author. It arrives monthly rather than on exit. So does a course.
My speaking fee went from zero to $5,000 after my first book, and now is $25,000 and is as high as $40,000. Every one of those invitations traces back to something I published.
Plus, I licensed What Would the Rockefellers Do? for 25,000 down and 1,000 a month. Which means letting someone else sell your work for a cut.
The links point to them, they get a forward, and now they leverage the brand and book, increasing my profit and distribution.
Tax efficiency.
Creation costs are deductible. Royalties can be structured without self employment tax. And the asset itself can be sold, which puts it in capital gains territory rather than ordinary income.
Confirm the structure with your own tax team, because entity choice decides most of this.
There is also a fourth dimension. It builds relationships while it earns.
Justin Donald was already a successful investor before he wrote a book. The book gave him a community, the community gave him increased deal flow, helped him build a community, and the relationships it built gave him a materially better life.
Free Training Details the Exact Wealth Operating System I Used… That You Can Use To Find Financial Freedom In Years, Not Decades
What Is Your IP DNA?
Your IP DNA is three answers.
- What you share,
- how you share it,
- and who it is for.
Get one of them wrong and you will likely quit, because the format will feel like a trap, feel like a grind, and won’t be the best expression long term of what you want in life.
I know because I did it. I hired a great consultant and we built a long form video model that worked, just not for me.
I went from 0 to 50,000 subscribers quickly, then stalled.
I was building a platform somebody else sold me rather than one I wanted to build, one that I could fully commit to.
What works for me now is direct to camera, a creative director asking questions off screen, and sprinkle some fun in it.
It shares my personality, and I enjoy it, which is why I keep doing it. Or when I do direct to camera on specific topics researched with SEO.
The formats are writing, speaking, video, interviewing, tools, and capture. One of them is yours that gets the momentum and will get you your best results.
If you want a shortcut, look at what you already do without anyone making you.
I now have Sam, my videographer, travel with me and capture moments from stage, recording my teaching to kids (been doing for years, just never captured it), and Q&As, coaching, or other ways I am teaching regularly anyway.
And if the blank page is the problem, skip it.
Capture beats creation for most business owners.
You are already saying the material on calls, from stages, in the car and with your kids.
I keep cameras on my desk for exactly that reason. The bottleneck was never ideas.
And now, I don’t have to wait on people when I write. I come up with the ideas, do the writing, but have created a system, a Rubicon, where Claude rates it, makes suggestions on editing, and even designs the final piece so I can move at twice the speed.
NOTE: never outsource the writing or thinking, that will create AI slop, but instead of needing designers, researchers, editors…you can do it while you write.
That writing could be outlines for talks, videos, or articles, books, and blogs.
How Do You Start When You Are Bad At It?
I started bad, in public, and you keep going. In 2003 I wanted to write a book mostly for bragging rights.
That motivation produced 72 mediocre pages of something called The Strongest String.
Terrible name, bad start, but…..that book became Killing Sacred Cows a #1 USA Today and WSJ bestseller, even hitting the NY Times list.
I ended up going to writing courses, hiring a great editor that was familiar with my content, and putting in the reps. Writing and rewriting.
Initially I was a terrible writer and maybe a worse speaker, monotone and scared. In my first 10 years I finished 1 book.
In the years since, I have written 10 more, and the difference is not talent. It is that I finally knew the path. Hired the experts so I could gain the skill, the expertise.
In 2023 my first blog took 6 hours. Today I write it in less than two hours. And with the extra time, I write outlines for 6 videos a week.
I take each one to then use the content in a different format, and write a LinkedIn article and a website post, all in about 2 hours.
I hired acting coaches (Larry Moss), speaking coaches (Roberto Monaco, Jonathan Sprinkles, Michael Port) and writing coaches (Tucker Max, AJ Harper) to get there.
A skill compounds, and unlike interest, you have influence over the rate.
In 2003 I was giving a speech at a Marriott in Costa Mesa. I was nervous. I was bad.
But I had Roberto Monaco filming it and going over it with me after. There wasn’t much positive, but he found it.
Then he came to Utah, invested a day with me and that night, 88 of 121 people jumped into a workshop I offered that was happening in 10 days.
I went from boring to dynamic, scared to confident, boring to engaging.
You don’t have to stay where you start, you don’t already have to be good. You can get there with work.
What Does The Path Look Like Now?
It used to be brutal. In 2004, my partners and I wanted to build a community and program called the Producer Revolution to help people with their money mindset.
Back then we built the entire system from scratch.
It cost six figures to create what you can now assemble in an afternoon. Just did this here in 2026 with Wealth Builders Club, at the click of a button.
- Skool, Mighty Networks or Circle are amazing tools to create community.
- Substack for writing with a list attached.
- LinkedIn for articles that reach professionals.
- YouTube for video, and the audio strips straight off into a podcast.
- Findaway Voices puts an audiobook in 32 places with one publish.
- IngramSpark and Amazon KDP handle print.
- HeyGen or Descript records an audiobook in a tenth of the time it took me to read mine aloud.
Even the outline for any article or even book only takes 20 minutes now. A timed brainstorm session I learned from my literary agent Michael Drew:
- 1 minute on the title.
- 3 minutes listing topics.
- 2 minutes to reorder them.
- 7 minutes on the subtopics, stories and analogies.
- 7 minutes to edit and prepare.
I want to repeat something again. Only use AI as an editor, a researcher and a builder, to be more efficient.
But, I’d never let it write the article or since I am a comedian, I’d never let it write a joke. Writing the joke is half the fun.
The creativity is the one part you cannot outsource without losing the reason people showed up.
How Do You Sell Something That Does Not Exist Yet?
You presell it, which means your customers buy before the product exists and their money funds the build.
Inside the Cycle of Creation, the method from Money Unmasked, the presell happens at the concept stage. Your own money goes in last, if at all.
I sold 22,000 copies of Killing Sacred Cows before the book was finished.
I brought in $150,000 for my first video program before we filmed it.
One interview with my friend Ian Stanley produced $17,000 in presells for my Win Then Play program, covering 70 percent of the production cost of the video course I was creating.
The structure has five parts.
- The pitch, which is what it costs to launch the first version.
- The benefits, which only founding members ever get.
- The catch, which is what you ask in return, like a testimonial or 3 referrals.
- The track record, which is proof you have built things before.
- And the guarantee, so nobody carries the risk alone.
The rule that makes it work: make the benefits long and generous, and the catch short and easy.
Behind all of it sits the Value Equation.
×
=
Build what you know, build who you know, and the money is the output rather than the input.
One of my friends and clients Tim Young texted me this last week. He is doing his audiobook, I told him about two things that will save him time and get more distribution- relationship capital.
Why Does This Outlast You?
Because you are capturing pieces of your life and putting them where your kids can reach them after you are gone. My books have been educating my sons for years. They have my thinking, in my voice, whenever they want it. My youngest son wrote this letter.
I would say that my dad has had the biggest impact on my life. He has always been a hard worker and has inspired me to push myself . He has pushed me to really pursue business and finance.
He has pretty much taught me everything I know about the real world.
Teaching me at a very young age some things that people learn to late into their lives. Like how the stock market works, how buying a house works and how to know what loan you can get, how banks work, what the Federal Reserve is, etc..
He also has been there for me in some of my lowest points in life where I really felt like there was no hope to get better.
But he has always been a beacon of light in my life I can always count on.
I truly would be happy to be half the man he is, and I wouldn’t change a thing about him.
So here is my question for you. What is the one thing you already explain for free, over and over, that could pay you and outlast you?
You might also enjoy this one: Getting Your Message Out to the World and Understanding Intellectual Property.
In prosperity,
Garrett Gunderson
Frequently Asked Questions
What is intellectual property as a wealth-building asset?
Books, courses, videos and tools turn what you know into work that can earn beyond the hours you spend delivering it. Garrett evaluates them through growth, cash flow, tax treatment and the relationships they create.
How do I find my IP DNA?
Answer three questions: what do you share, how do you share it, and who is it for? Start with a format you already enjoy using.
How can I start without writing a whole book?
Capture what you already teach on calls, from a stage or while answering questions. Use that material to identify one useful promise and build an outline.
How does preselling fund a new product?
Customers buy before the finished product exists. Explain the pitch, benefits, catch, track record and guarantee clearly, then use the proceeds to fund what you promised.
