The 53-year-old Scot spent 11 years at Goodison Park and worked patiently to establish the Toffees in the top half of the Premier League table and took them into Europe despite working to relatively modest budgets.
On Monday evening, he will welcome Everton to the Stadium of Light, where he is hoping to do the same thing with the Black Cats, and he knows it could take just as long.
Moyes said: "We are not going to be the biggest spenders, we are going to have to take time to attract the level of player here that we want and as long as everybody is aware it's going to be at least three or four transfer windows, it's going to take time...
"Football may have changed a wee bit, even from 10, 12 years ago, but the fact is unless you are going to have a big pot of cash and you can do it in one hit - and even if we could, Sunderland still probably couldn't attract that level of player just now.
"But we will attract that level of players in the years to come
That's the goal and that's the plan."
Moyes has fond memories of his time on the blue half of Merseyside, where he inherited a squad which included the likes of Paul Gascoigne, David Ginola, Duncan Ferguson, Thomas Gravesen, Alessandro Pistone, David Weir, Alan Stubbs, Kevin Campbell and Tomasz Radzinski and gradually rebuilt it.
He said: "It had to evolve because I didn't like that this was a club which was only going to avoid relegation and thought that avoiding relegation was good enough.
"It was a long time in doing it because (chairman) Bill Kenwright gave me £5million a year to spend at Everton - that was the budget - or if I could generate some other money myself, so I had that to work with and I was happy to do that.
"I had to go on the training ground, I had to organise and I had to coach, I had to build it up and I think if you look at the team we had at the start compared to the team when we left, it was a team full of international players, it was a team which was actually competing.
"In the last eight years, we finished in the top eight and really there were only one or two bad years - we finished 17th one year - and apart from that, the journey was terrific.
"It was a great time and I really enjoyed it, and that's why I see a big similarity to Sunderland."
Source : PA
Source: PA