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The Work Is Your Greatest Moat

The Work Is Your Greatest Moat

Competitors don't want you to keep working

Matthew Larsen
October 25, 2024

The Work Is Your Greatest Moat

I was sitting today (in real life) with an agency owner and we were going over operations.

This agency owner has a good amount of lead flow and opportunity from their network, social circles, etc. and so on, but like many, is now handicapped by operations more so than lead flow.

While I would say that this is certainly better than being handicapped by having no leads at all, and just being a helpless sitting duck with no future prospects or potential, not being able to close deals and deliver results because your operations are a mess is not ideal either.

As far as I am concerned, there are five main parts of a service-based business:

Yourself
Your Offer
Your Funnel
Your Operations
Your Employee Training

One of these things (or the absence of it) is going to keep you from growing the most at any given time. Once you start taking it seriously and "solve" the problem, you will experience the next level of growth, and then something else will become the most pressing problem and you will plateau again.

If you are currently plateaued or not growing, one of these five things will be the cause of it.

Let's create an example and give them all a rating out of 10 for this agency owner:

Yourself (them): 4/10
Their Offer: 6/10
Their Funnel: 4/10
Their Operations: 1/10
Their Employee Training: 2/10

While it would be fair to say none of these are good, operations is the thing that is holding them back. You may look at Employee Training and say that 2/10 is a terrible score, and you would be correct, it still isn't the most pressing concern right now. Once the Operations is handled a little bit and goes from a 1/10 to a 3/10, Employee Training becomes the priority. A score of 3/10 on the Operations would still not be good either, but again, life is all about context. 3/10 is better than 2/10, and if the Operations are a 3 and Employee Training is a 2, then it is employee training that is the biggest obstacle.

All business is, is cycling through and improving whichever of these five things is the worst at any given time. each time you do, you will experience an increase in business.

I am not going to seamlessly transition to the point of this newsletter.

The overall point of this is that all of this is a lot of work. When I talk about this stuff, people say "wow, seems like a lot," and yes, it seems like a lot, because it is a lot.

Who would've thought that building a large, highly profitable company would be a lot of work? I truly can't believe it.

The main action item from this is to switch your thinking. Flip it completely. Instead of whining and being a loser with the "this is too much work" frame of mind, do a complete 180 and think "my competitors won't want to do this" with a big smile on your face.

People often talk about "moats" in business.

An economic moat, often attributed to investor Warren Buffett, is a term used to describe a company's competitive advantage. Like a moat protects a castle, certain advantages help protect companies from their competitors.

If you are in a service-business, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people and businesses who can do what you do, and in many cases, they can do it better than you can do it, for cheaper.

Markets are always getting better and more efficient. That is competition for you. It is a good thing. Competition is the number one driver of progress in the entire world.

Because you cannot patent a service like Ecommerce Email Marketing, and because you cannot stop someone from doing a better job than you or charging a cheaper price or both, you have to find something else that could be considered a moat.

There is no better "moat" for a service business, or any business really, than one where you just do an extreme amount of work, consistently, over a long period of time, that no one besides you would be able to do.

And in the context of a service-business, that means putting in hundreds, if not thousands of hours into self-improvement, improving your offer, operating and optimizing your funnel, dialing in your operations, and creating foolproof employee training systems.

Good luck.