Most CFOs can recite their balance sheet from memory. Fewer can name the assets that never made it onto one: the audience a company has built, the capacity it isn’t using, the hours its people could spend on someone else’s problem. At a small organization, those are often the most valuable things we own. They are also the things most likely to be given away.
Last month I wrote here about budgeting toward a date we can see coming, the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. This piece is about the other half of that plan: what we spend when cash isn’t the currency.
USA Fencing runs on an operating budget of $17.6 million. That will never buy national attention for an Olympic and Paralympic sport. What we can trade might. Over the past year, that has put us in a lot of deals where no check changes hands, and it has taught us five things about managing value that isn’t on the books.
Count what you don’t book
Our members are an audience. Our athletes’ time has a price. Our broadcast airtime is inventory. None of it appears in our financial statements, and for years that meant none of it got the care we give a line item. If you haven’t put a price on something, you’ve effectively priced it at zero, and in a negotiation the other side usually notices before you do. So we now ask the same question of every non-cash asset that we ask of cash: What would someone else pay for this?
Price both sides of the barter
This column is a good example. USA Fencing has a partnership with Chief Executive Group. We bring speakers, athletes and hands-on fencing to four of its executive conferences. In return, we receive advertising, thought leadership and promotional placements across its publications. It’s a straightforward exchange of assets, and it deserves the same scrutiny as a contract with a dollar figure on it.
The discipline is simple to describe and harder to practice. Value what you give at what you could sell it for. Value what you get at what you would actually pay for it, rather than the rate card or whatever number makes the deal look best in a board update. I’ll be direct: Barter is real money moving off the income statement. If you wouldn’t write the check, don’t make the trade.
Find the inventory you’re already sitting on
We produce a weekly television show, “The Fencing Show,” and we control the commercial time on the networks that carry it. Some stations carry the show in exchange for keeping a share of that time. That’s barter again, priced in airtime. The rest is inventory that, until recently, nobody was assigned to sell.
Idle capacity only becomes revenue when someone owns turning it into revenue. We don’t have an advertising sales team, and building one would cost more than it earns, so we are bringing in a specialist partner to sell it for us. Every company has a version of this: a data set nobody licenses, a facility that sits empty on weekends, an expert who could advise a supplier. What’s usually missing is someone whose job it is to sell it.
Pool what’s too small to sell alone
Some assets are worth little in isolation. In 2025 we formed the United Sports Collective, a commercial alliance of six Olympic sports organizations (USA Fencing, US Squash, USA Cycling, US Sailing, USRowing and USA Lacrosse) with more than 350,000 combined members. On our own, each of us is too small to be a sensible buy for a national brand. Together, we are a buy that makes sense. For a subscale business, the right consortium can be worth more than a bigger budget, as long as everyone agrees up front how the value gets split.
Write the exit before you sign
In my last piece I argued for writing a stopping condition at the point of approval. In-kind deals need one even more, because nobody sees the cost leave the building. There is no invoice to question and no budget line to cut, so the deal renews by default. Attach a measure at signing. For a media partnership, that might be how many people actually act on what they saw. Then decide in advance what result would make you walk away.
Why it matters beyond fencing
Very few finance teams manage an Olympic sport. All of them manage assets that never reach the ledger: customer attention, idle capacity, data, the expertise of their people, a partner’s spare reach. Three questions are worth asking about each one. What is it worth to someone else? Am I trading it at fair value on both sides? And when will I stop?
We started asking them because we had no choice. A small budget leaves little room to give things away. A larger company has more room, which is exactly why it’s easier not to notice.
