Competitive Moat Review

⚠️ **Finance warning / Avertissement finance** : informational only, not investment advice. A moat review tests a claim, it does not certify one: a business with no surviving power can still be bought, but not at a price that assumes durability, private equity carries a real risk of loss, and no review here is a promise of return. Curated by Skill Harbor: the competitive moat review skill of the private equity pack in andreworia/claude-finance-skills. Use it after commercial analysis has mapped the landscape and before the exit multiple is set: commercial analysis asks how attractive the industry is, this skill asks whether this company holds anything durable inside it, and it is aimed squarely at every CIM that says highly defensible. The method applies a benefit-and-barrier test first: a power needs a quantified benefit (price, cost or retention a competitor cannot match) and a barrier that stops a well-funded competitor arbitraging it away, with the counterfactual set up front, because a funded entrant reaching parity in under 18 months means there is no moat. Each candidate power from Helmer Seven Powers is then tested on its own evidence in turn: scale economies (does unit cost actually fall with volume, margin plotted against volume over three years), network effects (value or retention rising with density, with data effects noted as flattening early), switching costs (measured in implementation days, integrations, migration, retraining and exit fees, cross-checked against what dissatisfied customers actually did), counter-positioning (the incumbent that will not copy it because copying damages its own economics), cornered resource (exclusive access, with its expiry date and renewal holder found), and process power (a capability in a system, not a person, which would be key-man risk). Survivors are ranked and dated, the review states plainly that most businesses at this size have one power or none and that a memo repeating all six is not diligence, asks separately whether the power holds volume or holds price, and translates the verdict into the model: the terminal margin and exit multiple it supports, a flat exit at best where no power survives, and any dated expiry run as a scenario, not a footnote. The worked example in the file, Pellworth Labs, is fictional and illustrative. From the andreworia/claude-finance-skills repository (MIT). Honest caveats: margin history, win and loss records, tender outcomes and the exclusivity contracts are yours to supply and to verify; measured switching costs beat asserted ones, and the skill insists on the measurement. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use.