30 free tools for owners who want to know what they have

Pick your engineering folder and see how many parts, assemblies and drawings you have, how many years they cover and how many revisions each part went through.

A big archive is not the same as an archive you can license.

Twenty years of Revit models, RFIs and change orders is a different thing from a folder of finished drawings.

If any of your work was for a government contract, part of your archive may be off the table.

Twenty years of engineering work rarely lives in one place.

Before anyone talks price, they ask for one page: which systems you use, how many years each one holds and whether you can export it.

Before anyone pays for your records, they will ask whether you own them.

Six months ago you had two ways to raise money.

Private equity pays a multiple of your profit and takes control of the company.

Your chat plan decides how much of your company's history you can see, keep and export.

Your history lives inside the software you pay for every month.

One ticket, one chat thread, one fix, one closed outcome.

Licensing a copy of your company's records does not mean handing over your secrets.

If you are thinking about licensing your company's records, your team deserves to hear it from you first.

Put in the terms from up to three offers.

A lot of new firms started pitching business owners this fall.

Demand for company records moves fast.

Every job you closed, loan you funded or claim you settled is a record of how the work actually gets done, start to finish.

The loads that went fine are not the story.

Law and accounting firms sit on some of the most valuable work history there is, and some of the most protected.

When you shut down, every subscription you cancel takes years of work with it.

A company closing its doors usually still owns things worth money: the domain, the code, the records, prepaid software, deposits.

Telling your investors you are shutting down is hard enough without staring at a blank page.

Your old startup's repository might still be worth something.

Upload or paste a spreadsheet of your clients and see which ones look like a fit for licensing their company records.

Add your firm's logo and get a one-page checklist your clients can use before they close, sell or raise: what to keep, what to export and when to check whether their records are worth something.

Associations, advisors and newsletters can give their members a free way to check whether their company's records qualify.

Every email you answered, ticket you closed and job you finished is a record of how real work gets done.

Years in business, the team you built, every job or ticket you have handled.

Eight quick questions about your company.