The Revenue Seed
How to not tell Business Development to just find more money.
MENTAL MODELS are your practical, pocket-sized frameworks for applied creativity.
Shall we examine the most frequented grievances between executive leadership and the Business Development function? The same suggestions repeated across strategy meetings, board discussions, and hallway conversations. The perennial: we just need to find another sponsor. Or, perhaps, more overtly: do we know any well-endowed philanthropists? (Yes, I’ve heard this line a few times in board discussions…)
On the surface, fine. These are practical questions, sort of. But they reveal something deeper about how most organisations understand revenue.
Business development is not about finding money. It is about designing value.
The way an organisation attempts to generate revenue often reveals far more about how it truly understands value than anything written in its most recent strategic plan. The difficulty in treating business development practices as a tactic is that it’s not. It’s a living system. Revenue outcomes are structural reflections of how an organisations designs value.
We see this so clearly in the industries which inherently operate in spaces of intangible value — those which rely on relational and cultural capital over pure transactions. Think of sectors like:
cultural institutions,
performing arts organisations,
museums and galleries,
charities and foundations,
membership associations,
sports organisations,
lifestyle and premium brands that rely on collaborations for cultural relevance.
For organisations like this, their lifeblood is not pure product or or service sales. They rely on a curated mix of revenue streams — something like sponsorships, philanthropy, memberships, and ticket sales — because their largest value source is intangible. Here, intangible value includes things like cultural meaning, affiliation, and collective identity. (Any accountant reading this who might like to quantify this on a balance sheet, please do share your insights in the comments. We are still in the early days of measuring this.) Because cultural capital is difficult to quantify, we often find ourselves in senior or executive discussions debating endlessly over where they value truly lies in the organisation’s latest brand collaboration or partnership agreement.
Herein is the sticky point. Organisations frequently try to extract value from systems they have never intentionally designed.
The problem
The systemic consequences are familiar, of random sponsorships, different departments selling pieces of the organisation, no unified commercial story, all the while servicing overhead quietly grows. Without acknowledging the depth of the issue, brands slowly become a collection of disconnected commercial promises. This then creates three structural failures at once:
Brand incoherence, where partners struggle to understand the platform they are actually affiliating with.
Operational inefficiency, where many small deals require disproportionate servicing.
Revenue ceiling, where organisations stay stuck in £10,000 sponsorship tiers when, with the same resourcing, they could easily pull 10x that.
When sponsorship becomes inventory
One of the most common structural failures I see appears in how organisations approach sponsorship. It so easily becomes mistaken for selling media assets. Naming rights for events, rooms, programs. Access to activations. Hospitality tickets. And, yes, this is obviously a core part of sponsorship agreements. But what differentiates them from regular media buying is the deeper relational layer. If you stay at the transactional layer, this is where deals struggle to break beyond tiny figures.
Revenue systems operate at three levels: (1) transactional, (2) relational, and (3) generative.
This brings us to this month’s Mental Model: The Revenue Seed.
