Read This When You’re Winning
I recently had a conversation with someone about Logline’s business and the work we do with agencies. In that conversation, I made the unfortunate, yet accurate, point that we serve a less than ideal market: agencies who can afford to hire Logline often don’t think they need to, while agencies that desperately want to hire Logline often can’t afford us.
Now, that framing is a bit pessimistic and doesn’t fully reflect our clients (we work with many firms who desperately want to hire Logline and can afford us), but it underpins the psychology of many agency leaders. There’s often a belief that the good times will last forever and the work (and luck) that got them to this point will keep them there.
If you find yourself having success right now and don’t think you need to think deeply about your sales and marketing, I’m going to share three stories and ideas about change that may impact your thinking.
Success Creates Instability
Roy Baumeister makes a fascinating observation about war in his book Evil:
The First World War had been so much more horrible than anything Europeans had remembered or even imagined that it produced a lasting and profound psychological impact. The winners concluded that there must be no more wars. The losers concluded that there had to be another war to set things right: So much sacrifice could not be allowed to be in vain.
Even if you so deeply believe in the validity of an idea, a current state, or the long-term potential of your agency, you and your business don’t exist in a vacuum. The more success you have, the harder it becomes to maintain - and what got you there is highly unlikely to keep you there.
Active and Passive Stability
There are two types of stability - active and passive.
Your home, assuming it has a good foundation, is passively stable. You don’t need to take any regular action to ensure it remains standing. And, barring a major external intervention, it will remain standing for a very long time. A plane, however, requires active stability. The jet engines need to be constantly firing or else it will drop out of the sky.
Like a plane, businesses require constant maintenance and updating. If you assume your agency is passively stable, you’re in for a rude awakening and fast regression. You need to apply energy and resources to the business to keep it going and that can’t just happen intermittently. If you start to feel the effects of instability, the recipe to stabilize again has most certainly changed and requires even more effort and investment than it would have when things were calm.
Your agency requires work to keep it intact - and if you commit and invest to constantly stay on top of its needs, you’ll have a great chance at long-term success.
Running Just to Stay in Place
There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called the Red Queen Effect. It comes from Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen tells Alice: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
One of the most cited examples is the peppered moth in England. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of these moths were light-colored, blending in against lichen-covered trees and avoiding predators.
As pollution spread, those trees darkened. The same camouflage that once protected them now made them obvious. A darker variant of the moth (previously rare) suddenly had the advantage. Over time, the population shifted. The darker moths became dominant. Nothing about the environment changed all at once. But it changed enough.
When an agency is seeing success and deprioritizes investment in marketing and sales, that’s not really a neutral decision. You’re already running to stay in place. The only question is what happens when you slow down.
