By Guest Post. Originally published at ValueWalk.
Article by Hurricane Capital @HurriCap ?
What’s the most important thing to do as a manager of a business? According to Warren Buffett it’s all about “widening the moat.” Nothing more, nothing less.
“Well, I send a letter to the managers and I talk to them about widening the moat. I say it isn’t the question of the earnings per share this quarter or anything like that. Any business that has a widening moat is gonna make a lot of money over time. They are guardians of the moat. I say a great business is like an economic castle. And if you have an economic castle in capitalism, there gonna be a bunch of people that are going to try and take it away from you. So I need a knight in that castle, the manager, who worries about protecting that castle all the time. And then I want this moat around it, and I want that moat to get wider. It may be service, it may be better product design, all kinds of things. It can be what’s in their mind about the product, a consumer product. But I want that moat to be widening. And I want people to toss sharks and piranha, octopus, everything into that moat to keep away those competitors because they’re gonna be coming and our managers are charged with that. I tell our managers, pretend that this is the only business that you and your family can own for the next hundred years, you can’t sell it and you’ve got to make this one work. And that means every day thinking about what’s going to make it a great business over a 100 years.”
(Source: 8:46 into Warren Buffett with B-School Students Interview from India)
For some input and ideas about what makes (or breaks) a moat, check out this slide deck from Pat Dorsey.
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