Moats are Not Walls. They Are Bricks.

Moats are not walls, they are bricks

When people see a moat, they see a wall.

But what they fail to see is all of the bricks that make up that wall.

This is the analogy I like to think about for building moats in business.

A business moat is not one thing: it is all the little things that build on top of each other that makes it strong and last a long time.

The more these little things add up, the more they seem to assimilate into each other, and the harder it is to identify and extract all of the work and materials that went into it.

Most of us conflate moats for walls because we see them too far from a distance. We forget to appreciate all of the little details and effort that have compounded over time.

What makes moats so hard to destroy is that they are hard to replicate. If we could easily understand everything they are made of, we would know how to break them.

Business books make it sound too easy - they pretend moats can be identified based on a menu of line items to choose from.

but reducing complexity and abstracting the details is not what will make your business harder to break. 

If it was obvious, everyone else would know. If it was easy, everyone else would do it.

Appreciating the complexity and sweating the details is what will make you indestructible.