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Part 3.0 — Making Value vs. Keeping Value

16 min read

This is Part 6 of 13 in the Capabilities and Competency series. The first four articles told you how a business works structurally. This one turns sideways and asks: where in the business does value actually live, and why is the same skill worth wildly different amounts in different industries? The answer is that every business has a centre of gravity (the part the customer is actually paying for), and the industry decides what it is. The same skill, applied at the centre of gravity, is a star. Applied as supporting cast, it's plumbing.

Table of Contents

Why this re-framing matters

Career advice tends to treat skills as if they have a constant value across all businesses. They don’t. The same skill is a star in one industry and plumbing in another, and the only difference is whether the skill produces what the customer is actually paying for, or just supports something else that produces it. This article gives you the test that tells those two apart, which is one of the most important moves in picking a skill that pays.

The two halves of value: making it and keeping it

Every business has to do two distinct things with value:

  • Make it (create something the customer wants enough to pay for).
  • Keep it (make sure the profit stays with the business instead of leaking out to suppliers, competitors, customers themselves through bad pricing, or operational waste).

These are not the same activity. A business that makes huge value but keeps almost none of it (a competitive ecommerce store with thin margins after returns and shipping) earns its founders less than a business that makes modest value and keeps most of it (a profitable B2B SaaS with 80% gross margin). The keep half is just as important as the make half, but you’d never know it from how career content discusses business.

The reason this distinction matters for picking a skill: the skills that make value and the skills that keep value are different categories, and they live in different parts of the business.

Making value typically involves:

  • Product and R&D (the thing customers buy is the product itself, so the act of designing and building it is making value)
  • Niche depth and specialisation (a rare skill that’s directly the product: a researcher, a designer, a senior engineer)
  • Operations when the operations are the product (a factory’s manufacturing capability is making value, because what you sell is the output of that factory)
  • Quality and reliability (when these are the reason customers pick you)
  • Brand and storytelling (when the brand is the reason for the premium)

Keeping value typically involves:

  • Pricing strategy (how much of the value created the business actually captures from the customer)
  • Finance, accounting, FP&A (the work that makes sure profit reaches the bottom line)
  • Operations when they’re the plumbing (a logistics operation that runs reliably so that the product the customer paid for actually arrives without expensive failures)
  • Automation and tech leverage (when they reduce the cost of producing what’s already made)
  • Customer retention (because revenue you didn’t lose to churn is revenue you kept)

==Operations and tech show up in both lists, which is not a mistake. They can be either making value or keeping value, and which one depends entirely on the industry. This is the central insight of the article.==

Making value: what does the customer actually pay for?

The honest question to ask of any business: what specifically is the customer paying for?

Not the marketing version. The honest, operator-level version.

A customer at a high-end restaurant pays for a meal, but also for the room, the service, the social signal of being there, the chef’s reputation. Strip any of those and the meal is worth less. A customer at a fast-food chain pays for a meal, full stop, and “the room” is essentially irrelevant. Same word (“restaurant”), very different breakdowns of what’s being purchased.

A customer at a SaaS company pays for the software (the product), the reliability of the service, sometimes the support, and increasingly the data the software accumulates about their business. The act of writing the code is the act of making the value. Engineers at well-run SaaS companies are paid like senior partners at law firms partly because they sit at the centre of value creation.

A customer at an ecommerce store paying RM 120 for a t-shirt is mostly paying for the t-shirt (the product) and partly for the brand identity attached to it. The act of finding the t-shirt cheaply, packaging it, and shipping it is operations work that keeps the margin healthy but isn’t what the customer is paying for in the first place. The customer would be just as happy if a different operator shipped the same shirt; they wouldn’t be just as happy if a different shirt arrived.

A customer at a manufacturer (say, a contract electronics manufacturer making circuit boards for OEMs) is paying for the manufacturing capability itself: precision, throughput, reliability, the ability to make 100,000 units this month and 200,000 next month without quality issues. The operations are the product. The factory floor is where value is made.

So "making value" lives in different parts of the business depending on what the customer is actually paying for. Get this wrong and you'll pour skill into the wrong part of the business.

Keeping value: what stays with the business after the sale?

The other half: once value has been made and a customer has paid for it, how much of that money stays with the business?

This is the question of capture, and it’s where a surprising amount of profit gets won or lost.

Take two ecommerce businesses both doing RM 5M in revenue. Business A has a 35% gross margin, 18% net margin, and keeps RM 900k in profit. Business B has a 22% gross margin, 4% net margin, and keeps RM 200k. They look the same on the revenue line. They are not the same business. Business A is capturing nearly 5x as much of its revenue, and the difference is almost entirely in keep-the-value work: better pricing (less discounting), tighter cost of goods (better supplier deals), lower fulfillment cost (better packaging, fewer returns), higher repeat purchase (lower CAC payback period), tighter overhead.

Each of those is a job-2 skill. None of them is glamorous. All of them compound.

A useful frame: the keep-half of value is the slow, quiet work that determines whether the business is actually profitable, regardless of how impressive the revenue line looks. Founders who only think about jobs 1 and 3 (grow and defend) frequently build businesses that look successful for years and then quietly collapse when the math catches up. The same is true at the personal-skill level: an operator who can fix a leaky margin is worth their weight to a growing business, even if no one outside the company can name what they do.

The tech-as-keeping-value sub-pattern is worth naming explicitly. In a non-tech business (a kopitiam, a small retailer, a service firm), tech is mostly plumbing: it makes the operation faster, cheaper, less error-prone. The customer doesn’t care about your point-of-sale software. The customer cares about the kopi. The POS software keeps value (makes the kopi business more profitable per cup) without making value (which is the kopi itself). Tech in this role is genuine value, but it's keep-half value, not make-half value, and the skill is paid accordingly.

Why the industry decides the centre of gravity

Here is the central claim:

The industry decides which half (make or keep) the centre of gravity lives in, and that decides which skills are stars and which are plumbing.

The rule of thumb in plain words: the part of the business that is the reason customers pick you is “making value.” That same part, in a business where it’s not the reason customers pick you, is just plumbing — “keeping value.”

Three concrete reads:

Tech industry (software, SaaS, internet products): the software is the product. Customers pick you because of what the software does, how it does it, and how reliably. Tech is making value. The engineering team is the centre of gravity. Operations (deploying servers, customer support, billing infrastructure) keeps value but doesn’t make it.

Manufacturing: the manufacturing capability is the product. Customers pick you because you can produce X units at Y quality at Z cost. Operations is making value. The factory, the supply chain, the quality team are the centre of gravity. Tech (ERP systems, MES software, finance tooling) keeps value but doesn’t make it.

Ecommerce and retail: the product (the t-shirt, the gadget, the food item) is the product. Customers pick you because of what they’re buying. Sourcing, brand, and merchandising are making value. Tech and operations (the website, the fulfillment center, the customer service team) keep value but don’t make it. Unless the delivery itself becomes the reason customers pick you (Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping is the canonical example), in which case operations flips back to making value. The flip is real and is why operators inside delivery-driven retailers (a 7-Eleven, a Shopee, a Grab) are paid more than operators at a generic retailer.

Consulting and professional services: the consultant’s expertise is the product. Customers pick you because of who shows up. Recruiting and training (the work that produces the expertise) is making value. Tech and ops (CRM, finance, billing) are plumbing.

Financial services (asset management, banking): the financial product itself (the return, the protection, the access) is what customers pay for. The investment process, the risk management, the relationship management are making value. Tech is increasingly important but still mostly plumbing, except at the edges (algorithmic trading, fintech-native players) where tech is the product.

==So a skilled operations leader is a star at a manufacturer or a delivery-driven retailer, and plumbing at a SaaS company or a consulting firm. Same skill. Different industry. Different value. This is the most important pattern in this article.==

The star vs. plumbing test

Before deciding a skill is worth getting good at, ask the test:

In this industry, is this skill the product, or the plumbing?

If it’s the product (the reason customers pick you), it’s making value. Stars in this position get paid like principals, build careers like founders, and compound.

If it’s the plumbing (necessary for the product to be delivered, but not the reason customers buy), it’s keeping value. Skill is rewarded, but capped at the value of the cost it saves rather than the revenue it produces.

A few practical implications:

  • A great engineer at Google is making value. A great engineer at a non-tech company (say, internal IT at a Malaysian bank) is keeping value. Same job title. Different industry. Pay differs by an order of magnitude over a career.
  • A great supply-chain operator at Proton or Top Glove is making value. A great supply-chain operator at a SaaS company is keeping value. Same skill set. Different industry.
  • A great salesperson at almost any growing business is making value (because sales is uniquely close to the revenue line). Sales is the rare skill that’s making value in most industries, which is part of why it’s so well-compensated. Even here, though, the kind of sales differs: enterprise SaaS sales is different from FMCG sales, and the skill set isn’t interchangeable.
  • A great copywriter at a brand-driven D2C company is making value. A great copywriter at a B2B industrial company is keeping value (the deal closes on the product, not the copy). Same skill. Different role.

The single best move a learner can make is to apply this test before specialising. The market is not paying you for the skill in the abstract. The market is paying you for the skill in a specific industry where it happens to be making value.

Worked example: ecommerce vs. SaaS vs. manufacturing

To make this concrete, here are three Malaysian-flavoured examples of the same general skill (operations) playing very different roles depending on industry.

Case A: A local skincare D2C brand doing RM 8M/year. Operations means warehouse management, fulfillment, returns, customer service. The customer isn’t buying operations; they’re buying the product. Operations is keeping value: faster shipping reduces complaints, cheaper packaging lifts margin, fewer returns saves money. A great ops lead here is worth maybe RM 12–18k/month. The role is real and necessary, but capped by the savings it produces.

Case B: A Malaysian SaaS startup doing RM 8M ARR. Operations means customer onboarding, support, infrastructure costs (AWS bills, mostly), billing operations. The customer is buying the software, not the operations. A great ops lead here is worth maybe RM 8–12k/month, because the leverage is even thinner than in retail: software has higher gross margin, so the cost-side savings matter less in absolute terms. The make-half is squarely with engineering and product.

Case C: A contract electronics manufacturer doing RM 80M/year. Operations is the product. The customer is buying the manufacturing capability itself: precision, throughput, quality, on-time delivery, the ability to scale up runs without errors. A great ops lead here is worth RM 25–40k/month or more, plus profit-share, because the entire revenue line depends on them making the operations excellent. The role is the business.

Same word (“operations lead”). Three different businesses, three different roles, three very different pay scales, and the difference is what the customer is paying for in that industry.

A learner deciding to “build operations skills” without choosing the industry is betting on average. A learner choosing to “build operations skills for manufacturing” is betting on the star position. The choice is worth more than the skill.

Where the lens breaks

Two genuine limits.

One: the centre of gravity moves over time, even within the same industry. Retail used to be about location (“the right corner makes the sale”); then about logistics (“two-day shipping makes the sale”); now increasingly about content and creator marketing (“the right TikToker makes the sale”). The skill that was making value in 2010 retail (real-estate intuition) is plumbing today. The skill that’s making value today (creator partnerships) might be plumbing in 2035. The test is "right now, what's the customer paying for in this specific industry," not "what is the textbook centre of gravity for retail in general."

Two: in any business, both making and keeping value have to happen. The lens helps you decide where to specialise, but it doesn’t let you ignore the other half. A SaaS company with great engineering and broken finance still fails. The lens is for positioning, not for ignoring half the business.

Minor edge: the make/keep framing is less clean in two-sided marketplaces and platforms, where value creation comes partly from network effects that no single function owns. In those businesses, the centre of gravity is “growth of the network itself,” which doesn’t map cleanly onto a function.

Part 3.0 takeaways

Key concepts to internalise

  • Every business does two things with value: makes it (creates what the customer pays for) and keeps it (makes sure the profit stays with the business).
  • Making value and keeping value live in different parts of the business, and the skills that do each are different categories.
  • The industry decides which half is the centre of gravity. Tech for software, operations for manufacturing, the product for ecommerce, expertise for consulting.
  • The star vs. plumbing test: is this skill the reason customers pick this business, or is it support for the thing that is? Star skills get paid like principals; plumbing skills get paid by what they save.
  • The same skill (operations, tech, copywriting) is a star in one industry and plumbing in another. The choice of industry is worth more than the choice of skill.

Your weekly task

The recurring closing move.

  1. For your case business, name what the customer is actually paying for. Not the marketing version; the honest one. Is it the product? The expertise? The operations? The brand? The convenience?
  2. Identify the centre of gravity. Which skill or function is closest to what the customer is paying for? That’s where the make-half lives.
  3. Run the star vs. plumbing test on the skill you’ve been considering. In this industry, in this business, is your skill the product or the plumbing?
  4. If it’s plumbing, ask whether a different industry would make it the product. A learner considering “general operations” might find that pivoting toward manufacturing-flavoured operations (or delivery-driven retail) turns the same skill into a star.
  5. Note what the make/keep lens didn’t see. Does the business have a strategic moat (Part 3.1)? A stage-dependent constraint (Part 3.2)? The lens is sharp on positioning but blind on time and competition.

Up next

You can now read where value lives. Part 3.1 — Power asks the next question: even when a business makes and keeps value, what stops competitors from copying it and competing the profit away? The answer is what strategists call “power,” and it’s the thing that decides whether value stays with the business over time. Without power, every well-run business eventually gets eaten.

Disclaimer

Business literacy education, not industry-specific career counselling. Pay ranges quoted are illustrative for Malaysia in 2026 and vary widely by company size, growth stage, and individual experience. The classifications here (tech as making value, ops as plumbing in retail, etc.) are useful patterns, not rigid laws.

Sources & references

The value creation / value capture distinction is foundational in strategy literature; the cleanest treatment is Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage (1985) and the body of work building on it. The “industry decides the centre of gravity” framing borrows from contingency-theory thinking and from Cedric Chin’s writing at Commoncog on how operating dynamics differ across business types. Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers (2016), which Part 3.1 will use directly, articulates the durability question this article ends on. Specific pay ranges in the worked example are illustrative based on 2025–2026 Malaysian recruitment market data (Robert Walters, Hays, JobStreet salary surveys), which the reader should verify before using as benchmarks.

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