Compounding in B2B: Building a 5‑Year Moat in a 6‑Month World

Most teams optimize for the next quarter. I try to build assets that get stronger every year: brand, data, distribution, and people.

1. Why compounding beats chasing trends

Chasing trends looks busy:

• New channels

• New campaigns

• New buzzwords

But most of that activity disappears in 30–60 days.

Compounding assets are different:

• They get more valuable with each new customer, post, campaign, or hire

• They are hard to copy quickly

• They reduce your cost of growth over time

That’s what I want.

2. The four big compounding assets I care about

For my world (outbound, deliverability, AI‑assisted sales), I think in four buckets:

1. Brand

   • Trust that you’ll do what you say

   • Thought leadership that actually teaches, not just promotes

2. Data

   • Campaign performance

   • Deliverability patterns

   • Benchmarks across industries and segments

3. Distribution

   • Newsletter audience

   • Social reach (LinkedIn etc.)

   • Community of customers and partners

4. People and culture

   • How we hire, train, and promote

   • The instinct to solve problems in a consistent way

Each year, I want to see all four getting stronger.

3. Turning operations into data moats

Most companies throw away their operational data.

I try not to:

• Standardize how we track campaigns and deliverability

• Turn patterns into internal reports first

• Then decide what can be shared as anonymized benchmarks or tools

Over time, that becomes:

• Better decision‑making internally

• Unique IP externally (reports, insights, models)

4. Content and newsletter as long‑term distribution

I don’t write content to “rank for a keyword.” I write it to:

• Clarify my own thinking

• Attract the kind of customers and operators I want

• Build a library that compounds over years

The newsletter (vladsnewsletter dot com) is where I test these ideas in public first:

• If a topic resonates there, it often becomes a product, feature, or deeper playbook

• If it doesn’t, we learned cheaply

LinkedIn is the shorter, more experimental version of the same system.

5. Balancing short‑term revenue with long‑term moat

I still care about hitting numbers. I just don’t want to only hit numbers.

So I’ll ask on big initiatives:

• Does this generate revenue and help us learn something durable?

• Can this campaign be reused or turned into an asset (case study, benchmark, tool)?

• Will this decision make us easier or harder to copy in 2–3 years?

If an initiative only looks good on this quarter’s board slide, I’m suspicious.

6. Questions I ask myself every year

Once a year, I sit down and ask, for each company:

• What assets got clearly stronger this year?

• What did we build that compounds without more effort?

• Where are we still renting growth from platforms we don’t control?

• What are we doing today that future us will wish we’d started sooner (or stopped sooner)?

The companies that win in B2B aren’t always the loudest.

They’re the ones quietly compounding while everyone else chases the next shiny thing.