Peter Murphy Lewis opened this one with a bank. He had finished a documentary about three months earlier on a community banker at a medium-sized bank with almost a billion dollars in assets, a man who had worn a tie every day for 50 years in the same building. His condition was that the film not be published until he has passed, because he did not want anybody to think he had done it for his own fame. He made it as a lesson for his grandson. “I just turned what you and I think is about cash registers and tellers and growth. I just turned it into intrigue,” Peter said. “And legacy.”
Bill hosts The Missing Half Podcast, which goes looking for what is missing in private equity and branding, and the missing thing this week turned out to be defensibility. The conversation started on documentary as a marketing format and quickly became an argument about moats: what a private equity owner or a mid-market manufacturer actually owns that a competitor cannot buy, copy or generate. Bill put the question directly. What could a rival do with AI to replicate a film about your company? Peter’s answer was short. “No, absolutely not.”
The line that stopped the episode came later. “The missing half of enterprise value, Bill, is not marketing, it’s meaning,” Peter said. “And the meaning is what protects the multiples.” That is the whole case in one sentence, and the rest of the hour is spent testing it against board decks, staffing crises, rebrand budgets, earned media and the price of a secondhand lighter. For more on this, see our article on documentary-style corporate storytelling.
Key Takeaways
1. A deck can be replicated, a lived experience cannot
Peter sat on the executive team of a turnaround that exited well, and the multiple was good largely because a third bidder came in. The board deck ran to about 120 pages and it was beautiful; his boss was a graphic designer. None of that is protection. “A slide deck, a board deck, a power presentation can be replicated rather easy,” he said. “It’s similar to AI. Like AI can replicate format over and over. It cannot replicate a lived experience.” He believes a 10 or 15 minute film of that deck would have moved the number.
2. There is no such thing as a boring company, only an undocumented one
The standard objection in M&A is that the story is dull, so the numbers should carry it. Peter rejects the premise. “There’s no such thing as a boring company nor boring industry. It’s undocumented,” he said, and once you document the narrative it becomes interesting. He pointed at Pierce Manufacturing, 3M, Boeing, John Deere and Milwaukee Tool as unglamorous firms telling stories well. His own proof is a zoo film built around a woman of 75 who owns 350 pygmy hippo soft toys and was flown in to meet a newborn one.
3. The moat is the journey, not the accolades
Asked about the mistakes companies make, Peter went straight at the highlight reel. “People are much more interested in the journey that accompanies the success,” he said, and the journey is where the defensibility sits: “The journey shows that there’s barriers of entry that someone can’t come in and copy and replicate it very easily because you went through a struggle, you got over it and now you’re bigger.” The second mistake is cramming. “The simpler the idea, the more powerful the story.”
4. Meaning is what protects the multiple, and a Zippo explains it
Peter defines meaning as “the compound effect that a narrative has over the numbers.” His illustration, borrowed from a talk he heard, is a lighter. New in the packet you might offer him five dollars. Take an old Zippo from a flea market carrying your grandfather’s initials and his high school, and he reckons you offer a hundred or two, maybe five hundred. Certify it as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s from the end of the war and it is worth about ten thousand. “They serve the same purpose. It’s meaning around something.”
5. The moat gets built inside the business before a bidder ever sees it
Bill framed the film as a de-risking tool for retention, recruitment and pricing power, and Peter pushed it further. Chasing new logos is the reflex; the harder discipline is looking after the people already there. “Right now there’s a staffing crisis in so many different places and that’s a huge, huge risk,” he said