The long goodbye of scale. Can success ever be sustainable?

It has been six months since I left the warm embrace of Karmarama and set off to join my business partners in my new adventure at Curve. That adventure has been busy and at times frantic but broadly successful; we’ve hired our first employee, developed some new workshop products and started working with some exciting new corporate and start-up clients. So far so good.

When I relay this story to friends in the industry they seem genuinely happy and quickly get to a question that I think they assume is the most exciting thing they can possibly ask “So when are you selling” or- to quickly get the body of this piece on track with its title- “How are you going to scale?”

Asking that question has the same affect in my head, as scratching a needle across some Vinyl and bringing a hitherto rather fun party to a screeching stop. It’s not that we don’t want to grow the business and be rewarded for our hard work. The problem is accepting that scale and success can only mean a deliberate and early enacted strategy of calf fattening and searching for a suitable deity to offer it up to as a sacrifice. That strategy might yield an element of personal wealth, but it also assumes that there can be no real long-term value in your business beyond your cashed-up exit, surely something that is a long-term issue for the buyer and seller?

The flying champagne corks in New York that heralded the arrival of another creative fire starter- Droga 5- into the Accenture Interactive family, suggest that M&A is still a much loved route to exit for Agency leaders. Yet the fact that many of them leave pretty much the moment the golden handcuffs fall away, suggests that model isn’t a good one to keep founders in a business long term. It appears that for every Bob Greenberg that manages to thrive in their new networked world, there are many more who find the lack of autonomy and the increase in politics too hard to bear. They- hopefully- leave with money, but very often with frustrations too.

Start-Ups begin with a similar zeal as Agencies but since they are not encumbered with the need to sell people and time, should have more opportunities to redefine scale. Somewhat depressingly the early injection of VC money most of them receive, cedes power and creates huge pressure to payback. That pressure very often leads to failure either of businesses too young to have had a chance or of very noticeable bonfires of investor money, like the much hyped Blippar, that were crushed by investor expectation.

Those that do succeed in achieving jaw dropping scale are in reality just as compromised. They eventually have to sacrifice product, and sometimes personal integrity, precisely because they have so much to pay back to those that backed them. You need only to reflect on the new collective name for Facebook and it’s ilk, Big Tech, and the echoes it has of Big Oil and Big Tobacco, to see how public opinion is swinging against them and how potentially problematic funding models for start-ups are, even for those that “win”.

So how do we- and the start-ups and smaller brands for whom we are increasingly helping build propositions for sustainable growth for- start to build models for a steadier, more satisfying type of growth?

Here are a couple we are working through with clients at the moment.

Scale a part rather than the whole

Whether it is British Gas creating a space for a new proposition like Hive to grow outside of the existing structures of a big corporation, or the success Mother have had in backing game changing agencies like Poke or Naked, it appears possible to help one part of your business play and grow by a different set of rules to the other. In the case of Hive that proposition became so successful that some of its ways of working have been adopted back into the main British Gas business, creating a new more energised business overall.

Change the meaning of scale

Dangerously subversive as it might be to write this in Campaign, but one of the ways to avoid scale that feels wrong for your business is to avoid just being judged by pounds and pennies- or Euros if you prefer. Whether you look to specific initiatives like B-Corps- that demand businesses balance profit and purpose- or entire countries like New Zealand- who recently announced they would be using wellbeing as well as GDP as a measure of success- there are precedents for creating and quantifying momentum in a different way.

 If in 5 years’ time I’d love to see new and more sustainable measure of success sitting alongside the ability to hoon around the Essex countryside in Elon Musk’s latest folly or bemoan the lack of plumbing in your third house.  At the very least it might also keep talent and experience engaged for a bit longer too.