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 His condition was that the film not be published until he has passed, because he did not want anybody to think he had done it for his own fame.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. “So if we can tell a story where people want to stay longer, goodness, that’s gonna impress your multiple, even if the people who are going to bid on it don’t watch your documentary.”
6. Earned media comes from contradiction, not polish
Peter says the angle that gets a journalist is “when you’re a little bit combative,” meaning you challenge the general assumption. Nursing homes shown through the people who care for your grandparents. A banker presented not as profitable but as a man leaving a humble lesson for his grandson. “It’s the angle and finding some type of contradiction that is interesting to the journalist,” he said, and he describes the resulting coverage as having a ten-year half-life. On the episode he credits it with a Wikipedia page and more than 100 IMDB reviews.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: What problem does a documentary actually solve?
A: Complexity. “If you’re in a vertical that’s hard to explain, this is a great way to translate it,” Peter said. His test is duration: hold someone for 45 to 90 minutes and “I guarantee you could explain anything.” An animated video or an elevator pitch cannot carry that weight.
Q: How long does it take and what does it cost?
A: He says a Hollywood documentary runs three to fifteen million dollars and takes one to two years. His own range is fifty thousand to half a million, set by how long the filming takes, and he says the ten he has worked on in the last year and a half each took under eight months from design to Netflix submission.
Q: Isn’t this a vanity project?
A: Bill’s counter is the rebrand line item. He describes private equity firms spending 250,000 to 1.5 million dollars on a style kit, new colors, new decals and a three-minute sizzle video that checks a box. The same money, he argues, could buy something that creates lift instead.
Q: How does this hold up against AI content?
A: “I would rather emotionally move five people at the enterprise level, then get 1000 extra views,” Peter said, citing the old 1000 True Fans essay. He is blunt about the ceiling of the alternative: “AI is not going to move you. I can guarantee that.”
Q: What is the simplest framework for a complex business?
A: Find a moment that changed you, an employee or a customer forever. Define who that person was before it. Show the moment, because “people can live it, they can feel it, is visceral.” Then show who they are afterwards. Before, after, then amplify.
What This Means for Private Equity Owners and Mid-Market Operators
If your exit is 18 to 24 months out, the timeline objection is already dead. Peter walked through one build on the episode: contract signed in January, filming from 15 February to 1 March, post-production finished on 5 May, shown at a convention of 2,000 people, submitted to Netflix two months later. Six months, start to finish. The starting question is not a creative brief. It is who inside the business, customer, employee, executive or owner, genuinely loves what you do.
Put the cost next to the rebrand line rather than the marketing budget, because that is the real comparison. A style kit, new signage and a three-minute sizzle video absorb the same money and leave you with something every competitor in the portfolio also has. A film about how the company actually came to exist cannot be reproduced by anyone else, which is the entire point of Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling practice. The asset stays yours because the lived experience is yours.
Do not underspend on the part nobody sees. Peter puts research and preparation at about 70 percent of the outcome, with the remaining 30 percent being communication on set. His director meets every protagonist two or three times for half an hour to an hour before a camera appears. He has used the same director, camera crew, sound person and post-production team since 2017, which is why two days of filming with four people was enough for the banking film. That discipline is what Strategic Pete’s documentary video production services are built around, and he is emphatic that good audio beats beautiful visuals every time.
Then work the asset rather than shelving it. On the episode the two of them counted the uses: an ABM piece that lands with a buying committee of five to ten people, a recruitment and retention story, a fundraiser screening that one client’s chief executive told Peter produced their largest event ever, and earned media generated by taking a contrarian angle. Start it while the business is still being built, not in the month the deck is due, because the moat only works if it exists before anybody asks to see it.
Listen to the Full Episode
“The Brand Moat Competitors Can’t Copy: Documentary Marketing for B2B & M&A” aired on May 21, 2026 on The Missing Half Podcast, hosted by Bill. The full conversation covers the community banker film, the 120-page board deck, the Zippo lighter, the cost and timeline question, the 70 percent that is preparation, and the earned media that follows a contrarian angle. Listen to the full episode.
