TIP727: 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
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You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, we're diving into what I believe is one of the most practical frameworks for understanding business strategy and competitive advantages, and that's Hamilton Helmer's book, Seven Powers. Warren Buffett has long emphasized the importance of owning high-quality businesses, and a key trait of these businesses is their ability to sustain high returns on capital over long periods of time.

To do that, they need a moat. But what exactly makes up a moat and what makes a business defensible and keeps competitors at bay? That's exactly what Hamilton Helmer sets out to answer in Seven Powers. After decades of investing and consulting, he distilled his findings into a clear framework that identifies seven distinct sources of enduring competitive advantages. In this episode, we'll walk through each of the seven powers in depth and explore examples like Netflix, Facebook,

SAP, Tiffany, Vanguard, and Toyota. Without at least one of the seven powers, a business is destined to deliver average returns on capital and is vulnerable to disruption. So with that, I hope you enjoy today's episode on seven powers by Hamilton Helmer.

Since 2014 and through more than 180 million downloads, we've studied the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your host, Playthink.

Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Clay Fink, and today I'll be sharing the key takeaways I learned from reading Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. Hopefully, you'll pick up a nugget or two to add to your toolkit as an investor or a business person yourself. Helmer put together the Seven Powers framework after hundreds of consulting engagements and decades of active equity investing. He argues that a business without at least one of these powers lacks a viable strategy in

and is vulnerable to disruption.

The seven powers covered in the book include scale economies, network economies, counter-positioning, switching costs, branding, cornered resource, and process power. I'll be covering each of these powers in depth during this episode. Now, this book was interesting for me to cover because as a stock investor myself, I'm very interested in learning about what gives a business a competitive advantage. I own nine individual stocks in my portfolio at the time of recording,

And now that I've read seven powers, I'll need to walk through each business and mark down each of the seven powers that each business has. And if I come to find that one of my companies doesn't have a strong case for any of the powers, then that business might be in trouble because they're likely to be disrupted. I also work for a small business myself here at TIP, so we're constantly thinking about how we ourselves can leverage the powers we hold and use them to our advantage.

The companies in my portfolio lean pretty heavily into the process power category, which is quite rare and can be difficult to correctly identify, and it's potentially the most difficult power to sustain over a long period of time. A network effect, for example, is one that's pretty durable and able to be sustained for long periods. We recently covered booking holdings on the show.

And the power of their network effect is a big reason why I recently purchased shares from my own portfolio. Now, when we look at Constellation Software, for example, which is another holding of mine, Mark Leonard has famously said that anyone can pick up a phone and start dialing to try and acquire software businesses. From the holding company's perspective, the core of their competitive advantage, I believe, is process power. On the surface, it might look easy to pick up the phone and go out and try to buy software companies.

But to do it in the way that Constellation has done it is not as easy as it might appear on the surface. Helmer illustrates the example of Toyota in the book to illustrate how process power works in more detail. However, Constellation does have a couple of other powers that Helmer outlines. For the software companies they own, the companies benefit from high switching costs.

which gives these companies a high amount of sticky and recurring revenue. They also have a cornered resource with their proprietary dataset that gives them insights on what types of businesses they should be buying, what IRRs they can expect, and where the best opportunities are all around the globe. Now, zooming out, power and competitive advantages are incredibly important to understand. If we look at a company that's growing at around 10% per year, 85% of that company's value

is derived from their cash flows after year three. So if you miss assess on the durability of a company's cash flows in their competitive mode, then you can be just totally off the mark when judging a company's true underlying value or their intrinsic value. So Helmer defines power as the set of conditions creating the potential for persistent differential returns. So in other words, power is simply the ability to earn high returns on capital.

This falls in line with what Pulak Prasad stated in his book, What I Learned About Investing from Darwin. If he could define a high-quality business with one metric, he would look at the return on capital employed. As Helmer puts it, power is the core concept of strategy and of this book too. It is the holy grail of business, notoriously difficult to reach, but well worth your attention and study. He then defines strategy as a route to continuing power

in significant markets. He explains that power has two necessary and sufficient conditions, a benefit and a barrier. A benefit is a method that improves your business relative to your competitors. Benefits or improvements happen in businesses all the time, practically every single day. Now, a barrier is an improvement that not only improves your business, but it also widens the gap between you and your competitors, and that gap must persist over time.

Meaning that your benefit isn't accessed by existing and potential competitors. So a power exists when you have both a benefit and a barrier in place. It's not enough just to have a benefit because your competitors could also have that same benefit and the excess returns that were generated from that can quickly be arbitraged away by the market. Now, one of the key takeaways for me from this book was that benefits are plentiful, but barriers are not.

For example, hiring productive employees is of course a benefit for a company, but that doesn't mean that your competitors can't also hire productive employees. Or a retailer selling items in bulk can be a benefit because the retailer sells more volume and the customer gets a better price per unit. However, the barrier to selling in bulk is quite low. Another key insight was that great businesses are built through innovation. When you look at visionaries like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Reed Hastings,

they are doing something entirely new. They aren't looking at their competitors and saying, "How can I just do things a little bit better?" They are looking at an industry and just totally revolutionizing them, which can't be done by just looking at your competitors. So those are some of the key concepts to keep in mind as we walk through these seven powers here. So let's dive into the first power covered, which is scale economies. Scale economies refer to when a business has declining per unit costs

as production volume increases. Helmer illustrates the example of scale economies with Netflix. He took the leap and invested in Netflix in the spring of 2003. And at the time, Blockbuster dominated the DVD rental industry with their brick and mortar retail stores. But Helmer saw the potential for Netflix to shake things up through their impressive mail-to-order business. Blockbuster faced the unpleasant choice of losing market share or eliminating late fees.

which accounted for around half of their income. Helmer's investment hypothesis was grounded in this uncomfortable dilemma.

Blockbuster would drag their feet facing up to the painful existential imperatives that confronted them and Netflix would continue to cannibalize their customers. However, Netflix also knew that it was only a matter of time that the physical DVD business would be supplanted by digital streaming distribution. Moore's Law ensured that would be the case once advances in internet bandwidth and capability allowed this transition to take place.

So they strategically set up both business units as they officially started their streaming segment in 2007. They knew that if they didn't make themselves obsolete, then somebody else surely would. Initially, Netflix negotiated with content owners for streaming rights, but in 2012, they made the radical choice of creating their own content that would be exclusive to their platform with the release of the House of Cards series. This move proved to be a total game changer for the industry,

Because if other streaming services wanted to differentiate their offering, they would also need to spend to create original content in order to effectively compete with Netflix. This industry dynamic would give Netflix a structural cost advantage through scale economies. If Netflix spent, say, $100 million on content and they had 30 million subscribers,

they would effectively be spending $3 per subscriber. This level of spend would be incredibly difficult for a provider with, say, 2 million subscribers, as they would be spending $50 per subscriber. As Netflix grew their number of subscribers, they would be able to spread out these fixed costs over a larger subscriber base, which created a flywheel as they could invest more in content than their competitors, which would then attract even more subscribers.

Now, this competitive advantage was out there for anyone to see, but what would prevent someone from raising a bunch of money, investing in new content in order to attract subscribers, and thereby give Netflix a run for their money and potentially steal market share? Helmer argues that in order for a competitor to effectively steal market share, they would have to provide more value to customers either through differentiated content or lower prices. In an established market, such tactics would be visible to the leader, which

which in this case is Netflix, if a new player tried to enter the market with lower prices, Netflix could potentially match that price decrease themselves to prevent the new entrant from stealing much market share, which could inevitably destroy shareholder value for the new entrant rather than creating it, establishing a barrier to entry in a strong competitive mode to Netflix. It's not that a competitor can't necessarily enter and try to compete with Netflix, it's that entering the market comes with an unattractive payoff

or an unattractive risk-reward dynamic. Helmer writes here, "This situation creates a very difficult position for Netflix's smaller-scale streaming competitors. If they offer the same deliverables as Netflix, similar amounts of content for the same price, their P&L will suffer. If they try to remediate this by offering less content or raising prices, customers will abandon their service and they will lose market share."

"Such a competitive cul-de-sac is the hallmark of power." So a company like Netflix has the task of trying to balance their power. They of course want to achieve high returns on invested capital, but if they achieve returns that are too high, then that might encourage competition to enter, bringing their returns down over time. On the flip side, if they price their product too low, then they could be leaving a lot of money on the table as customers are receiving a disproportionate share of the value created. So it's this balancing act.

Beyond fixed costs, there are a few other ways in which scale economies can emerge. One is from distributed network density. As the density of a distribution network increases to accommodate more customers per area, delivery costs decline as more economical routes structures can be accommodated. One example of this is Old Dominion Freight Line, which is a less than truckload carrier that we covered in depth on episode 652.

Another is purchasing economies. A large-scale buyer can often elicit better pricing for inputs. Walmart and Costco are prime examples of this since they have the scale and reach that few retailers have. As our listeners know, a competitive advantage is required for a business to earn high returns on capital over long periods of time. In the case of Netflix, the presence of this is obvious as it's one of the best performing stocks in the market since the company went public in 2002.

Transitioning here to the second power, we have network economies, otherwise known as network effects. Network economies occur when the value of a product to the customer is increased by the use of the product by others. Helmer illustrates network economies with the story of Rick Marini. In 2010, Marini launched BranchOut, which was a professional networking app similar to Facebook, but tailored to professionals. He raised a $6 million Series A round of funding,

and was off to the races in attracting users. Recruiters want to make the best use of their time, so they typically go to the source with the largest number of active professionals. At the same time, professionals looking for work or who want to keep their options open work-wise want their names listed on sites with the most recruiters. This is a critical aspect of a network economy. One side of the network growing increases the value for the other side and vice versa.

creating a self-reinforcing upward spiral.

Marini knew the fiercely competitive realm he was entering, which was to rapidly scale or die. Catching up to an established network economy is usually impossible, and at this point, LinkedIn already had 70 million members. But Marini was betting that the race wasn't over yet, and that he could build off of Facebook's user base of 700 million users by tying their platform in with Facebook, since most people wanted to keep their personal and professional life separate.

BranchOut would quickly grow from 10,000 users to 500,000, showing early promise as he went to raise another $18 million. Monthly active users then exploded, hitting 14 million in the spring of 2012, just two years after the launch of the platform. But the party ended about as quickly as it started as churn outpaced growth and few users were truly engaged. The site would shut down in September of 2014.

The central feature of network economies is that the value of the service depends on the presence of others. Marini was well aware of this characteristic and aggressively pushed out tactics to encourage use of the platform, but clearly LinkedIn and Facebook were much more successful with their own strategies. Building network economies are notoriously difficult. Even Facebook launched Facebook at Work, only to learn that users wanted a clear distinction between social platforms for work and their personal life.

When we dive deeper into the characteristics of network economies, we find that once it's established, the company with the leadership position has the ability to charge higher prices than their competitors because of the higher value provided, which is a result of the larger user base. For example, LinkedIn's HR solution suite comes with more LinkedIn users, so they can charge more than a competitor can.

Or Facebook can charge advertisers more than another social network can because they have targeted ads that deliver a higher ROI per advertising dollar spent. The barrier for network economies is the unattractive cost benefit of gaining share. This can be extremely high. Try and think about what you would have to offer someone to use branch out instead of LinkedIn. Once LinkedIn has already been the established user base, there's very little incentive for people to switch.

The amount of capital it would take to convert a significant portion of LinkedIn's user base is an unthinkable amount. So it just wouldn't be worth a new player trying to enter the market. And if they do, they would essentially just be throwing money down the drain. As a result, network economies tend to be a winner-take-all industry once the leader has crossed some sort of tipping point. Once the leader achieves a certain scale, then the other firms are just forced to throw in the towel.

For example, Google launched Google+ in 2011 to compete directly with Facebook, and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars investing in this platform, yet they still ended up shutting it totally down in 2019. In my view, network economies have brought us some of the best businesses in the world because their moats are just so difficult to disrupt, and they're extraordinarily profitable. Just to keep on the topic of Facebook here,

Since it's one of the most obvious network effects when looking at Facebook Blue and Instagram, Facebook, now known as Meta, had 1.4 billion global users in 2014. This grew to 3 billion in 2024. Revenue over that time period grew from 12 billion to an astounding 164 billion, more than a 10X over that 10-year time period. And the return on invested capital today is around 35%

showcasing the strength of their moat. What's also interesting to me about these spectacular network effect businesses is that they oftentimes aren't directly offering the product or service that users are going to the platform for. For example, Airbnb helps travelers find a place to stay, but Airbnb does not offer any of these accommodations. Uber helps people catch rides, but they themselves aren't providing the ride-sharing service.

Additionally, I think with these big tech companies, they benefit from both scale economies and network economies. So Meta, they have more capital than any social media company to invest in their platform. And they're putting X amount of dollars into their platform. That's likely to be much more than all of their competitors. But if you look at it on a per user basis, it's likely that they're spending less than their competitors. So they're getting more bang for their buck in terms of maintenance capex.

despite them in aggregate spending more than say Snapchat or X. The reason for this is that a new incremental Facebook user or a new user of Airbnb, for example, adds practically no incremental cost to these platforms. So whatever revenue these new users generate practically flows straight through to the bottom line. With that, let's turn to discuss the third power, which is counter positioning, which is Helmer's favorite form of power because it's so contrarian.

Helmer defines counter-positioning as a newcomer that adopts a new superior business model that the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business. So the incumbent might see that they're being disrupted by the new player and just sort of throw their hands up saying that there's no way that they can step in and do what the newcomer is doing because that would mean that they need to disrupt themselves. Let's outline counter-positioning by sharing the example of Vanguard,

and its assault on the world of active equity management. John Bogle started Vanguard in 1975 and took the radical approach of starting an equity mutual fund that simply tracked the market, doing away with the manager actively selecting the holdings and trading in and out of certain stocks. Not only that, it would also operate at cost, paying all returns back to shareholders. Eventually, a third innovation would be put in place as well. Vanguard became a no-load fund,

meaning that there would be no sales commissions. The fund finally launched in 1976 and saw less than $20 million of inflows over the year that followed. For brokers who were so used to selling actively managed strategies to their clients, Vanguard's passively managed fund was quite off-putting. Helmer writes here, swimming against the riptide of self-interest in the investment business is

is not for the faint of heart, end quote. For many of these brokers, I'm sure that selling in an active strategy meant that it would help them pay their mortgage and feed their family. So a fund with no sales commission was likely of little interest to them, even if it showed promise of delivering more value to their clients. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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All right, back to the show. But Vanguard, by design, had a fundamental advantage over most active strategies. By definition, the average gross return of active funds has to equal the market returns. And since their expenses are substantially higher than Vanguard's passive funds, their average returns will always be lower. With time, it seemed inevitable that investors would realize that most active strategies

were bound to underperform Vanguard's passive strategies. So Vanguard would start at an asset base of zero in the 1970s, and this past year, they crossed $9 trillion in AUM. Let's say that your typical active strategy would capture, say, a 1% fee on assets. This would mean that Vanguard is essentially passing up $90 billion in revenue that would otherwise be generated by an active strategy, yet they're charging practically nothing.

The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, ticker VOO, has an expense ratio of 0.03%, for example. That means that for every $1,000 invested, investors are paying 30 cents for the privilege of earning higher returns than most of their peers who are invested with active managers. It's just incredible. Additionally, finding an active manager that can consistently outperform a passive strategy can prove to be incredibly difficult.

Just because an active manager beat the market in 2024, doesn't necessarily give them a good chance of doing the same in 2025 and beyond. Once Vanguard's business started gaining momentum, it felt like there was no stopping them year after year as more and more capital flowed from active strategies to passive asset managers. Part of what made Vanguard's rise so successful is that the incumbents were too slow to ever disrupt themselves.

they faced the innovator's dilemma. They were successful collecting fees selling actively managed strategies, so launching a passively managed and low-cost fund would be entirely against what their business was built on. It required a new entrant that developed a superior and entirely different business model to upend the well-entrenched and formidable incumbents. And Vanguard certainly isn't the only example of this.

Hilmer also shares the case of Apple versus Nokia, Amazon versus Borders, which was a retailer that sold books, and Netflix versus Blockbuster. All of these feature the same outcome, which was that the incumbent was paralyzed, unable to respond to the new threat, or they respond when it was too late. It's easy to say that Blockbuster was a bunch of fools for not acting against the rise of Netflix, but one of the key parts of all of the powers discussed

is that there are barriers in place that sort of keep competitors out. Blockbuster simply felt that their best course of action was just to stay the course, rather than completely change what had been working for them for many years. The barrier to entry in the case of Blockbuster was that they didn't want to divert capital to a new project that they weren't sure if it was going to work out or not, and was likely outside of their circle of competence. This is a key aspect of counter-positioning.

"Netflix had nothing to lose in betting on the future of streaming and the value that technology could bring to consumers. Had Blockbuster pursued the same strategy, they had everything to lose. At its peak, they had over 9,000 stores, and they were likely better off to simply milk their existing business." Trey Lockerbie : Hilmer also points out that visibility is another issue. Even if you see that your business is being disrupted, it's in decline, losing share to the new entrant.

you might not have any visibility as to whether their investments will have a good payoff in the future. If the new entrant can't make money entering the new market, then why would you want to pursue a similar strategy? Incumbents can also be biased towards the status quo. Initially, incumbents tend to belittle the new way of doing things, leading them to grossly underestimate their potential. In the face of the low-cost passive fund, Ned Johnson of Fidelity once remarked,

Why would anyone settle for average returns?" This negative bias can lead to a decision not to enter the new market, even if an objective observer might judge such an investment the other way. Yet another issue from the incumbent's perspective is job security. Once a company is large and established, oftentimes the people who manage that business simply want to keep their job and provide for their family and not take too much risk. If you are making a few million dollars a year at Blockbuster,

Why risk totally changing your business model, risking potential failure, and potentially losing your job? Economists refer to this as an agency problem because the agent's actions are at odds with the organization they represent. Helmer believes that counter-positioning is one of the toughest management challenges. When he started teaching at Stanford in 2008, Nokia was the leader in smartphones. By 2014, just six years later,

"Nokia had disappeared from the market." He writes here, "Nokia's CEO, Steven Elop's memo titled Burning Platform in 2011 captures well the immense frustration of a counter-positioned incumbent." And then here's a quote from Elop's memo from 2011. "While competitors poured flames on our market shares, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time,

"We thought we were making the right decisions, but with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. The first iPhone shipped in 2007 and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over two years ago and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes." Unbelievable." End quote. Helmers noticed a repeated trend of a disrupted incumbent.

He refers to this as the five stages of counter-positioning. We have denial, ridicule, fear, anger, and capitulation. Helmer believes that ELOP was in the anger phase in that 2011 memo. Lastly, I'll share one more observation from Helmer that summarizes counter-positioning for the challenger and the incumbent. The challenger is usually experiencing rapid gains in market share and strong profitability, or at least the promise of strong profitability,

The incumbent is usually experiencing market share losses, an inability to counter the entrance moves, eventual management shakeups and capitulation, often occurring too late. Transitioning here to the fourth power discussed, we have switching costs. Switching costs are defined as the value loss expected by a customer that would be incurred from switching to an alternate supplier for additional purchases. To illustrate the power of switching costs,

Helmer uses the case study of SAP, which is the leading supplier of enterprise resource planning software, or ERP. You can think of this as software that businesses use to centralize business functions such as finance and accounting, human resources, supply chain management, sales and customer relationship management, and much more. Despite SAP's success in ERP, the company is no poster child for customer satisfaction.

One study found that 43% of SAP customers were unhappy with SAP response times across all components. Despite this, 89% of customers expect to continue being a paying customer in the near future. The simple reason is due to the high switching costs. So despite many customers being unhappy with their service, they still stick around and keep paying for that service.

Once ERP is integrated into a client's business, employees have already learned to use it, relationships have already been established with the service team to solve problems, and investments have been made in the software to customize the system to their specific needs. Switching to a new ERP system would require the time and effort researching your options in complementary software, transferring all the data, retraining employees, forming new relationships,

risking that things go potentially all wrong and much more. Even if a new ERP solution came along that was significantly better than SAP's, it would make for a pretty tough sell because the switching costs are just so high. Once a customer has bought in, they're hopelessly hooked, enabling SAP to reap the rewards in the future for things like annual maintenance charges,

upgrades, add-on services, software and consulting, all these sorts of things they can charge their existing customer base. The benefit of switching costs to companies like SAP is that they're able to charge higher prices to their customers than their competitors for equivalent products or services. This benefit only accrues to the power holder in selling follow-on products to their current customers, and switching costs have no benefit to their potential customers.

So switching costs are a non-elusive power type, meaning that all players in an industry can enjoy the benefits of high switching costs. So IBM and Oracle, they're competitors to SAP, and they also benefit from high customer retention rates and high switching costs. As the market matured, the benefit of switching costs became more transparent to all players, and they were able to calculate the value of an acquired customer

And more often than not, this led to enhanced competition to grab new customers, and this eventually arbitraged away the value of those new customers. This meant that in order for SAP to grow, they needed to generate more revenue from their existing customers, and this led to a host of add-on products that they would add over time. To help go down this path, they went on to acquire other companies,

and these other companies' products would be integrated into their existing suite of products. As their customers became more and more entrenched into SAP's ecosystem, the switching costs also just rose over time. In order for competitors to compete with the power holder, such as SAP, they must compensate customers for the switching costs that are in place. This could be done by offering more value at a similar price or a similar amount of value at a much lower price that exceeds the cost of switching.

Helmer breaks down switching costs into three broad categories. First is financial, which refers to the monetary cost of switching. Second is procedural. This is a bit murkier, but it is a real cost. They stem from the loss of familiarity with the product or from the risk and uncertainty associated with the adoption of the new product. And third is relational, which are the costs that result from breaking emotional bonds built up through the use of the product and through interactions with other users

and service providers. Oftentimes, a customer establishes close beneficial relationships with the provider's sales and service teams, which can prove to be highly valuable over the long run. I'm reminded of a recent example where I myself, I switched brokers that I would use to invest in stocks. I used to have my stock investments on a broker that I won't disclose here, and I switched all of my stock investments to interactive brokers in early 2023,

And despite it being a pretty painful process, it was well worth it for me for a number of reasons. There were high switching costs in making this transition. I had to call both brokers multiple times. I was put on hold for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, however long it took. And then I had to wait at least three weeks for the transfer to actually go through and all these follow-ups I had with them. It was time intensive. And typically brokers are going to charge $100 or so to transfer an account from their platform.

And a broker has no reason to make it easy for you to transfer an account. That's just them losing business and it's just, they lose you as a customer. But since the benefits were so high for me in switching, then it was well worth it for me to do so. So there are a couple of reasons for why it was worth it for me to switch brokers. So the first reason is that Interactive Brokers gives me access to invest in about any market in the world.

And these are stocks that I just wouldn't have access to with my previous broker or a lot of other brokers. And although I don't bat 100%, a few of these have been good investments for me that have treated me well. For example, I recently shared a video on YouTube outlining the investment case for Lumine, which is listed on the Canadian Venture Exchange. I first purchased shares in the company in October of '24. And as of the time of recording, the value of my shares are up around 50% for my cost basis. So had I not switched brokers,

then I wouldn't have had access to purchase shares in Lumine. The next big reason I really like Interactive Brokers is that their fees are just so low, which is how they've been able to attract a lot of new users. And just by happenstance, I've been a bit interested in Interactive Brokers as a stock as well. And I've listened to a couple of deep dives on the company and looked into potentially doing a deep dive here myself on the show. And it's interesting to me how they've grown organically to 3 million users per

primarily through word of mouth marketing. And that's just a testament to their superior offering. And I think switching costs is also a benefit to them as well, because it's likely painful to switch from them to another broker. I should also mention that I'm not being paid to highlight the benefits of this great product. I'm just a happy customer. And I thought it was a good example to tie this into the discussion on switching costs.

I'm not a shareholder in SAP, but I do own a few stocks that focus heavily on vertical market software solutions or VMS for short. So VMS solutions cater to a very specific niche. And there are several things that are attractive in this industry, one of which is high switching costs. When a customer has less than 1% of their expense items in the cost of this software, and it's mission critical, they have to have it. They just aren't worried about,

If there's a slightly better option out there or slightly cheaper option out there, they just want an offering that works and generally want to stick with what they're accustomed to using and most familiar with. As a result, this also leads to pricing power, high margins, and healthy free cash flow for these VMS companies. You can even imagine a scenario where a competitor comes in, they offer a similar product at say an 80% discount because they're utilizing AI, for example.

Perhaps many customers still wouldn't switch because the current offering, they're just used to it. There's the uncertainty of the new product, and then there's all these switching costs associated with moving to something else. This brings us to the fifth power we'll be discussing today, which is branding. Branding is defined as the durable attrition of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller.

Buffett and Munger have made a fortune from recognizing the power of a great brand. See's Candy, Coca-Cola, and Apple are all great examples that they've capitalized on. Owning a brand that is loved in the eyes of the consumer can simply be the gift that keeps on giving. So Helmer gets into the case study here on Tiffany. Back in 2015, Good Morning America purchased a diamond ring at Tiffany & Co. for $16,600 and

and one of similar size and cut at Costco for $6,600. They then brought in a reputable appraiser to assess the value of each ring. He assessed the Costco ring at $8,000 and the Tiffany ring at $10,500 at a non-brand name retailer. Despite the value of the Tiffany ring being somewhat similar to that of other brands, Tiffany is able to command a hefty premium above other brands.

The appraiser described how Tiffany has built a reputation based on trust and quality. When you buy a ring from Tiffany, you don't have to think twice about your purchase. You know exactly what you're getting and you're paying for that. One customer review explained that they knew they were paying up for a ring at Tiffany and they would happily do it again. Their priority was to buy from the best of the best without a doubt of quality, certification, etc.

they were not interested in purchasing a cheap knockoff. Another thing in the back of the customer's mind was that their grandchildren would eventually inherit that ring. Part of the rationale for them buying from Tiffany was the impression that ring would leave on their grandchildren when it was passed down to them. Tiffany's position may be enviable, but getting there was a long, arduous journey. The company was founded in 1837 and has long cultivated a reputation for high-quality jewelry.

They first gained world recognition by winning awards for their silver craftsmanship in 1867 at the Paris World's Fair and continued to win awards at subsequent world fairs. Over time, the brand has become a standard for wealth and luxury. Over its long history, they've carefully curated their brand and image. You can see this on their packaging, for example. On its signature blue box, they write,

Glimpsed on a busy street or resting in the palm of a hand, Tiffany blue boxes make hearts beat faster and epitomize Tiffany's great heritage of elegance, exclusivity, and flawless craftsmanship." So if we walk through some of the verbiage they use here, heritage implies a long and positive history of creating elegant, exclusive, and flawless jewelry.

"Elegance designates a particular aesthetic design that consumers can consistently expect. Exclusivity hints that the product can only be attained by those willing to pay for the very best. It also suggests that only Tiffany and no competitors can provide this type of craftsmanship." Flawless assures the customer that over this long history, Tiffany has repeatedly created perfect products

meaning buyers face no uncertainty as to the quality of the jewelry they're getting. This powerful brand shows in the margin profile as well. While competitor Blue Nile has razor thin margins at around 2% to 3%, Tiffany's margins are around 12%. Tiffany would eventually get bought by LVMH for $15.8 billion in 2021, making it the largest luxury deal ever up to that date. Diving more broadly into what gives a brand pricing power,

Helmer explains that branding is an asset that communicates information and evokes positive emotions in the customer, leading to an increased willingness to pay for that product. So the brand itself can have value that is distinct from the objective value of the good. For example, a generic cola may be indistinguishable from Coca-Cola in a blind taste test, but even after revealing the results, the taste tester remains willing to pay for Coca-Cola.

Uncertainty reduction is also important. A customer attains peace of mind knowing that the branded product will be just as expected. Brands can have a strong barrier to entry since the best brands can only be created over a lengthy period of reinforcing actions. Competing with a brand like Tiffany, which has been built over 200 years, is quite a difficult undertaking that will take many years to do with no guarantee of success at all.

My colleagues, Sean O'Malley and Daniel Monca, covered another luxury brand, Moncler, over on episode 13 of the Intrinsic Value Podcast. And they introduced to me this mental model of thinking of a company as either making deposits or withdrawals in their brand's equity value, or considering a brand as an investment in physical infrastructure that goes on the balance sheet.

When a company invests in a fleet of vehicles, for example, those vehicles will depreciate over, say, seven years. So you have an upfront investment of, say, $25,000 and $3,500 in depreciation each year before another investment needs to be made in a new vehicle seven years later. The payment for the vehicle is the deposit into the account for plant property and equipment, and the depreciation over time represents withdrawals from that account. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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All right, back to the show. In the case of Tiffany or Montclair, they've been making deposits into their brand account for decades and rarely, if ever, make withdrawals from that account. So their brand is only getting stronger with the passage of time. There are plenty of ways in which brands can make withdrawals from their brand account or potentially damage it. They can go down market by selling cheaper items at higher volumes, which reduces the perceived exclusivity of the brand and

For example, if Ferrari were to start selling cars for $50,000 or $60,000, then this could potentially increase their profits in the short term, but likely hurt the value of the brand and the profits over the long term. Another way the brand can be impacted is by reducing the quality of the product. Nike has made all these investments in their brand by investing in the brand deals with top athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. If Nike were to reduce the quality of their shoes over time,

Then again, this would probably increase profits in the short term, but it's likely to come at the expense of the perceived value of the brand over the long term. Robert Leonard : Helmer lists a number of other challenges that brands face. We have counterfeiting, since a brand oftentimes stems from a label. Counterfeiters may try to free ride by falsely associating a powerful brand with their product. Many counterfeit knockoffs in the luxury space are being cheaply manufactured in China, for example.

which is a threat that luxury brands are constantly facing and monitoring to try and protect their brand. In 2013, Tiffany actually sued Costco for implying to shoppers that they sold Tiffany jewelry. A press release to investors after the filing of the 2013 sue explicitly noted, I quote, "Tiffany has never sold nor would ever sell its fine jewelry through an off-price warehouse retailer like Costco."

Another consideration for brands is changing consumer preferences. For example, Nintendo developed a brand for family-friendly video games. However, as the gaming demographic evolved from predominantly children to adults, there was a shift in demand for more mature games. Another brand I find interesting is simply studying Apple. When I was in college, just about all of my classmates were broke, yet all of them owned a Mac.

Apple has a number of things playing into their power. So Apple prioritizes simplicity and creativity to foster a brand that people really resonate with and can forge an emotional bond with. Apple itself has become a status symbol and a cultural icon. If you're a college kid with a Mac, you simply fit in with your friends. You're not the lame kid with the boxy and slow computer. They also do a good job of providing a consistent customer experience across all of their user touchpoints, whether that be

the user interface on the iPhone, the unboxing of the product, the consistent feel of their products, the iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, et cetera. Great brands create a positive emotion with their customers. When they purchase a brand, they aren't just buying a product. They're getting something else with it, oftentimes that positive emotion. People feel good buying an iPhone, even if they have to pay $2,000 for it.

Even if they have a negative experience with their battery life a couple of years in, they still go back and buy that iPhone. Even in my family, it's funny. My dad, he would get picked on for years for being the one person in our family with an Android. He almost felt forced to get an iPhone, even though he didn't necessarily want one and everyone else in our family had an iPhone. We felt that he should have one too. Despite Android being the market share leader globally,

Apple captures the majority of the profits in the smartphone market because they offer something of value that other firms just aren't able to easily replicate.

Transitioning here to the sixth power, we have cornered resource. A cornered resource is defined as preferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value. In other words, this is when a company has access to a resource that others simply don't or can't get access to. Cornered resources can come in varied forms, such as preferential access to a valuable patent, such as a blockbuster drug.

a required input such as a cement producer's ownership of a nearby limestone, or a cost-saving production manufacturing approach. Timo Leipzig : Helmer illustrates the case study of Pixar. I bet you didn't know that most of Steve Jobs' wealth actually came from the sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006 and not from the rise of Apple. Disney purchased Pixar for $7.6 billion, netting Steve Jobs $4.4 billion in Disney stock.

In November of 1995, Pixar made a moonshot bet with the release of Toy Story, which was the first computer animated feature film. With a production budget of only $30 million, it went on to realize a worldwide box office take of over 350 million. The success of the film enabled Pixar to go public, and they went on to release several other successful films, including A Bug's Life in 1998 and Toy Story 2 in 1999.

Their commercial success was also impressive as they posted gross profit margins of over 50%, while other non-Pixar movies would have gross margins around 15%. Even more impressive was the film by film performance as they were able to consistently post above average and impressive gross margins. This is coming from a company that in 1990 had shrunk to less than 50 employees and had frequently teetered on ruin

often sustained only by Steve Jobs. Helmer claims that there is no precedent for this sort of sustained success in the movie business, which spanned over multiple directors and multiple teams. But Pixar's power didn't seem to fit the mold of the power types previously discussed in this episode. Movies are a collaborative creative endeavor, and as a result, they're usually immune to the predictable recurrent triumphs indicative of power.

To understand Pixar's competitive advantage, Helmer paints some color on how Pixar came about. In 1986, a small company was spun out of Lucasfilm to Steve Jobs for $5 million, and the newly independent entity was renamed the Pixar Computer Group. Pixar had three extraordinary people leading the charge. Of course, you had Steve Jobs, who at the time was struggling with Next Computer, and only two years prior was ousted from Apple.

Next, you had John Lasseter, who was an animation genius who two years ago was fired from Disney. And finally, there was Ed Catmull, who was the computer scientist who had the intelligence and ability to master the nearly impossible art of managing high-octane creatives. Jobs was the business and financial fanatic, Lasseter was the creative brains, and Catmull possessed the technical skills. Helmer claims that without any one of these three,

the Pixar story would have been an unhappy ending. For Pixar, the cornered resource is its creative talent and culture, specifically its brain trust and its storytelling capabilities. Although any of Pixar's key talent would have been highly sought after by competitors, there was an unusual amount of loyalty with Pixar. During Pixar's rough early days, Lasseter won an Academy Award for his Pixar short

prompting Disney to try and recruit him back to their company. To this, Lasseter stated, "I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history." So in Pixar's case, the barrier to competition was personal choice. Since poaching Pixar's employees wasn't an option for Disney, they ended up deciding to acquire them to gain control of such valuable talent. The example of Pixar also reminded me a bit of SpaceX.

SpaceX has some of the most talented aerospace engineers in the aerospace industry, and the Lasseter comment about making history reminded me a bit of SpaceX. An engineer can probably get a safe, secure job at NASA, but if they're more interested in leaving their mark on the world, it might be more appealing for them to work at SpaceX, which prioritizes innovation and has a clear mission of making life multi-planetary. With the cornered resource of bringing in top talent,

In a prioritization on a culture of innovation, this enables them to vertically integrate their business, giving them a cost advantage and enables faster iteration and tighter feedback loops. Another cornered resource that SpaceX has is proprietary IP. SpaceX has been the only aerospace company to have consistently reused rockets for commercial use. Part of what enables them to do this is having the IP around these custom parts and making these products in-house.

Having rockets that they're able to reuse dramatically reduces the cost of launching, which further strengthens their cost advantage over competitors. This brings us to the final power discussed in the book, which is process power. Hilmer defines process power as embedded company organization and activity sets that enable lower costs and or superior product in which can be matched only by an extended commitment.

Hilmer has found that process power is quite rare in businesses today. The case study he shares here is Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer. Around the time that Hilmer graduated from college in 1969, he and a close friend who was a fellow car enthusiast had acquired the Toyota dealership rights for the area in Northern New England. At the time, it seemed like a risky move given that Toyota held a 0.1% market share in the US

but his friend considered it an investment in an extraordinary up and comer. What he was impressed by was the sheer quality of their vehicles, which was a contrast to those offered by the world leading firms based in Detroit. General Motors, for example, held 48% market share in the US. Toyota had spent nearly two decades relentlessly honing a competitive asset referred to as the Toyota Production System or TPS.

In 1950, E.G. Toyota, then the managing director, spent three months in Dearborn, Michigan, studying the Ford River Round Plant, which was the largest integrated factory in the world. While his earlier visit to Ford in 1929 had left him profoundly impressed, his reaction in 1950 was quite the opposite, as he saw that Ford maintained deep inventories, which were used to smooth out production irregularities,

but it seemed like a total waste to EG. Toyota had deep roots for quality and efficiency, leading them to develop TPS. This led to higher quality and more durable cars than their American counterparts. While many have tried to emulate this approach, few have been able to do so due to Toyota's deeply ingrained culture that requires alignment from top leadership all the way down to the factory workers.

It's not just about assembly lines and lean manufacturing principles. It's a highly refined set of processes developed over decades that improve quality, reduce waste, and empower frontline workers to identify and fix problems in real time. This led Toyota to go from 0.1% market share in the 1960s to over 14% in 2014. Meanwhile, General Motors' market share went from over 50% in the 1960s

to just over 17% in 2014 in the US. General Motors recognized the effectiveness of TPS, and they even came to an agreement with Toyota in 1984 to allow them to utilize the production techniques that Toyota was using for their own factory in Fremont, California. GM had high hopes that this partnership would enable Toyota's techniques to be transferred to their own plants. So the Fremont workers were sent to Japan for training,

But GM was unable to effectively replicate Toyota's results in their own facilities. The challenge was that TPS is just not as simple as it might seem. On the surface, it consists of fairly straightforward procedures that all work together, such as Kaizen, which encourage continuous improvement, and Kanban, which encourage inventory control. Despite thousands of businesses having toured Toyota's facilities,

Few have been able to effectively replicate their results because of the systems that support their plants and the complexity that you just don't really see when you're touring. Ernie Schaefer, the manager of a GM plant wrote, "They never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of the key people. I've often puzzled over that. Why do they do it? And I think they recognized we were asking all the wrong questions. We did not understand the bigger picture."

All of our questions were focused on the floor and the assembly plant. That's not the real issue. The issue is how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?" End quote. So clearly the level that Toyota was executing at for all those years far exceeded that of many of their competitors, and it was incredibly difficult for others to replicate. Since Toyota's process for manufacturing cars was difficult to replicate,

it creates a barrier to entry for competitors to produce vehicles of similar quality at a similar price. Process power ties in well with the competitive advantage we discuss here at TIP, which is simply execution. With some businesses, it might be simple as to why a business does so well, but not easy. If we use a sports analogy, it's simple for a basketball player to show up every day, practice the fundamentals, get strength workouts in, shoot 500 to 1,000 shots every morning,

It's simple, but it's not easy. Similarly, all retailers can see that Costco runs a ruthlessly efficient operation. Perhaps there are some aspects of their process that are difficult to see from the outside, but for the most part, their strategy is just out there for all retailers to see. Yet practically no one has been able to replicate that strategy. Costco is the Stephen Curry or Michael Jordan of retailers.

They're as disciplined as they come in refining their internal operations, promoting a positive culture from within, and continuing to enhance the customer experience. We as humans are constantly tempted to take the path of least resistance and fall prey to short-term pressures. Costco has resisted these pressures, such as the opportunity to raise prices slightly to bump up their margins. But Costco, they have a gross margin of 12%, while Walmart's is 25%.

Part of what makes process power such a strong competitive advantage is that it's something that just can't be built overnight. Even if a competitor tried to get started by matching Costco's prices, launching their own private label brands similar to Kirkland, using a membership model and building a similar warehouse format, they wouldn't be able to replicate the outcome without decades of process refinement. Then you have the high level of trust with suppliers, well-trained employees,

in that culture that they have in place. So the competitive advantage is much more than what meets the eye.

So the second part of Helmer's book is titled Strategy Dynamics, which discusses how the seven power types are developed. The first insight that Helmer shares here is that all power starts with invention. He then goes on to revisit the case study on Netflix. When Helmer first invested in Netflix in 2003, his hypothesis had two legs. First, Netflix's DVD rental business had power. It was counter-positioned to the brick and mortar incumbent Blockbuster,

It had process power as well as scale economies relative to other DVD by mail businesses. The second leg of the hypothesis was that Netflix's power was not properly recognized by investors, aka he believed that the stock was undervalued and mispriced. Just because a company has power doesn't mean it's a good investment. Helmer's hypothesis, of course, proved to be correct and Blockbuster would declare for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September of 2010. Helmer writes here,

"The dramatic demise of this previously high-flying competitor served as testimony to the potency of the counter-positioning I had hypothesized." End quote. However, Netflix still had to prove itself in the age of the internet as Reed Hastings knew that the DVD-by-mail business would be temporary. As early as 2005, Hastings shared publicly that in the future, movies over the internet would be the way movies would be consumed

which is why the company was named Netflix and not DVD by Mail. It was unclear how Netflix would be able to earn high returns on capital in the streaming business given that the content owners would want to wring out every ounce of profit they could for their rights. Netflix would launch their Watch Now feature in January of 2007, which included 1,000 titles, which was tiny compared to the DVD library they had with 100,000 titles. As their customers responded positively,

Netflix set out to make deals with CBS, Disney, and MTV, and subscriber growth would continue on a hot start.

In 2007, they had 1 million subscribers, and in 2010, they already had 7 million. This was good news, but again, streaming seemed to have no source of power. And Netflix had come to face Michael Porter's uncomfortable truth, operational excellence is not a strategy. Netflix came to the realization that content lied at the heart of their problem of developing a long-term source of power. Great content represented any streamer's core value proposition,

And for Netflix, it accounted for the bulk of their cost structure. Unfortunately, content holders could charge for their content based on usage, which could prevent much economies of scale from taking place, which put other licensors on an even footing with Netflix, regardless of scale. Ted Sarandos, the head of content at Netflix, took the first step in addressing this challenge by pursuing exclusive content. This totally changed the game for Netflix, as the price of an exclusive was fixed,

And all of a sudden, their substantial scale advantage over other streamers made a difference. It was also key that Netflix owned the content themselves because if other content owners recognize the success that Netflix had, then they could increase their pricing in the future to try and get their piece of the pie too. This permanently altered Netflix's bargaining position with content owners. Since Netflix had the money to create their own content, the other content owners would need Netflix

more than Netflix needed them. The success of Netflix's strategy is obvious when looking at their share price, as shares are up over 1,000 times since the IPO in 2002. This is especially impressive given that today, Netflix is up against behemoths like Amazon, Disney, Apple, and YouTube. The rise of Netflix's stock isn't because investors in the 2000s were foolish though. It's that the path to power was unknown,

and unknowable, even to Netflix's management team. Once Netflix captured a scale advantage and successfully produced their own originals, they were able to successfully become a highly cash-generative business that earned high returns on capital. As I mentioned, the first step in every power type is invention, be it the invention of a product, process, business model, or brand. Helmer writes, "'The adage of me too won't do' got

guides the creation of power." Invention came about in the case of Netflix because technology allowed for streaming to take place globally. Netflix was ready to capitalize on this tectonic shift and Reed Hastings saw it happening years in advance and prepared for it by capitalizing on the DVD by mail business in the meantime while the underlying technology in streaming caught up. And finally, the firm must find a route to power.

So first you have the external environment, which has all sorts of different threats and opportunities. Then you have the individual companies with resources that they can use to capitalize on the ever-changing external environment. And finally, the company must use those resources to invent new solutions and find their route to power. Now we know that power arrives on the heels of invention, but success also requires scale. Having power in a small market doesn't deliver all that much value to shareholders.

Helmer also came to the conclusion that the ascent of great companies is not linear, but more like a step function. There are these critical moments when decisions are made that inexorably shape the company's future trajectory. And after that point, it can be incredibly difficult to disrupt these businesses. So once Netflix crossed some sort of tipping point, it was very unlikely that a new entrant was going to be able to disrupt them. Or once Facebook crossed a tipping point for users,

there was really no going back. So this is really a key insight because after that window of opportunity closes, then you might be able to get some sort of differentiated insights from an investment perspective because you're able to forecast with more certainty or potentially forecast further into the future because you have a better understanding of their competitive position in light of this step change. That wraps up our deep dive into Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. I

I hope this framework helps you better evaluate what gives a business its edge, and more importantly, whether that edge is durable. As Helmer says, benefits are common, but true barriers are rare. And understanding that difference can be a game changer for both investors and operators. Lastly here, before I let you go, I wanted to highlight an event that TIP is hosting in the fall in the mountains of Big Sky, Montana in September 2025. The event is called The Investor's Podcast Summit.

We'll be gathering around 25 listeners of the show to bring together like-minded people and enjoy great company with a beautiful mountain view. We're looking to attract thoughtful listeners of the show who are passionate about value investing and are interested in building meaningful connections and relationships with like-minded people. Many of our attendees will likely be entrepreneurs, private investors, or portfolio managers. I'm absolutely thrilled to be hosting this special event for our listeners

and I can't wait to hopefully see you there. So to learn more, you can go to our website. We have the pricing, frequently asked questions, and the link to apply to join us. So if this sounds interesting to you, I'd encourage you to check it out at theinvestorspodcast.com/summit. That's theinvestorspodcast.com/summit. Spots are limited, so be sure to apply soon if you'd like to join us. So with that,

Thank you so much for your time and attention today, and I hope to see you again next week.

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