What the things you cannot touch are worth.
Brand, customer relationships, data and capability now account for the majority of enterprise value in most listed businesses. They are also the assets with no unit cost, no depreciation schedule anyone believes, and no owner who is accountable for their condition.
So they get valued once, at acquisition, by someone allocating a purchase price under an accounting standard. After that nobody reads them again until an impairment test forces the issue, which is roughly the worst possible moment.
Brand. Customer. Intellectual property. Capability. Position. Optionality. Execution. Each is read through the four lenses and given a value with a confidence range, not a point estimate that will be quoted back with a precision it never had.
The readings cross-walk to the accounting treatments where they have to: purchase price allocation, impairment testing, insurance valuation. The difference is that the reading resolves to an instruction about what to do with the asset, which no accounting standard has ever asked for.
Intangibles runs six instructions rather than seven, because the domain distinguishes six workable actions and not one more. Invest: allocate above the maintenance level. Defer: hold position and re-read. Re-segment: restructure how the asset is organised. Reposition: move the asset. Simplify: reduce the complexity built up around it. Exit: divest or retire it. The working vocabulary in most businesses is invest and do nothing, with exit reserved for assets that have already failed publicly.
You provide the ordinary records. Management accounts, whatever brand or customer research already exists, the contracts and registrations sitting behind each asset, and a few hours with the people who look after them. Nothing gets built specially for the reading. If an asset has never been valued before, that is common and not a problem.
Each asset then gets read through four lenses. What it contributes in cash terms. How the people whose opinion drives its value actually see it. What it would let the business do next. And whether the business can maintain and defend it well enough to collect. The fourth lens does the hard work: a valuable asset the organisation cannot support is worth less than the spreadsheet says, and the reading says so.
The four readings combine into one instruction per asset, drawn from a set of six: invest, defer, re-segment, reposition, simplify or exit. Each instruction arrives with a confidence level, a named owner inside your business, and the date the call will be checked against what actually happened. The check date is not a courtesy. It is how the method stays honest.
Illustrative composites, drawn from the pattern of engagements rather than from any identifiable client. Figures are indicative.
Intangible valuation splits between an accounting tradition that measures faithfully and only at the moments a standard demands it, and a brand-valuation tradition that publishes annual league tables which no one has ever been able to reproduce. Both are backward-looking by construction, which is a strange property for the assets that determine what a business can do next. Volume II adds an instruction and a confidence range, and accepts the embarrassment of being checked at twelve months.
And commercially: it tells you what to do with the asset, not just what to book it at.
Twelve months after a reading, the instruction is compared against what happened and the result is recorded, whether or not it is flattering.
A Volume II reading settles what your intangible assets, the brand, the customer base, the know-how, the data, are worth to the business, and what to do about each one: invest, defer, re-segment, reposition, simplify or exit. It starts small. You describe the decision in front of you, and Rob reads whether the method fits it before anything else happens. Send one sentence: what is the decision you are trying to make?