philvischer.com
It all seems to have been painfully avoidable, and I find this story a reminder that even successful businesses can be brought to failure if one isn't vigilant.
Here are some sections I think are interesting for people who don't have time to read all eleven parts:
> We were proposing to triple our expenses, while only doubling our sales. More concerning, we were proposing to double our staff size, without increasing our ability to produce films. Of the 165 hires being requested, only a handful were in the animation studio. Ninety percent were in finance, HR, marketing, licensing and design. So at 315 people we would be able to produce no more videos per year than we had produced five years earlier with a staff of 10.
> Did I want to release all of this product? Did every last bit of it have a compelling ministry objective? Did it all fit into my “masterplan” to benefit America's kids? Frankly, no. None of it was against our mission, and most of it promoted a biblical value or virtue in some way, shape or form, but the sheer volume was driven not by mission, but by a desperate need to keep Big Idea from collapsing. Many of us felt the tension between our ministry-driven mission and the vast amount of merchandise we were attempting to drive into the market. The pace of work, however, left precious little time for introspection.
> There were no comparables for VeggieTales. Our sales had skyrocketed 3300% in four years! Against that backdrop, how do you project the future? More skyrocketing? Was our growth almost done, or just getting started? Look at another example: Between Christmas 2003 and Christmas 2004, sales of Apple's iPod increased by a staggering 500%. A huge success, but also a huge challenge. How many iPods do you make for Christmas 2005? 500% more than 2004? 100% more? 10% less? Unprecedented success is extremely difficult to manage simply because it is unprecedented. Every year is a big ol' guess.
> I was a shy kid who would rather read Starlog Magazine or build a rudimentary optical printer out of cannibalized 8mm projectors than show up at the prom or run for student government. As VeggieTales took off, I became terrified that my business inexperience and lack of people skills would result in Big Idea's failure. So, in a panic, I brought in others to help, often spending far too little time getting to know them before or after the hire. I then backed down from my own convictions, assuming that an executive with an impressive resume surely knew better than a Bible college dropout.
* * *
So many decisions involving tens of millions of dollars were made based on nothing concrete. Not even gut feeling. Just blind hope.
And it's horrible because the stuff they guessed about is knowable to some extent. I seriously doubt Apple goes into Christmas having no clue what the iPod demand will be. It seems like simple market research would have clued them in.
Interesting too is the settling that happened in picking the first executive team. He couldn't convince the best people to move, so he settled for second tier. That seems like a horrible decision: spending just as much money with lower chances of success.
I'm sad to see the company go down, but some of the decisions made were just dumb: Obviously a cheap, 2D spinoff is not going to be as successful as its parent. Why would you agonize over firing 30 people when the entire company is going bankrupt in months?
There's a lot to think about in this story.
Other things my kids won't learn about, unless they want to explore it from the perspective of human superstitions or in fantasy stories:
Astrology
Witchcraft
Area 51
Scientology
Sasquatch
Vampires
Elves
Oh, yeah, and can't forget Eskimos
Of course, in the context of fantasy, all of this stuff is fine. But I don't think adults should tell kids that things that are clearly fantasy are, in fact, reality. Kids actually believe things that adults tell them, so I think you should try to tell the truth to kids as much as possible.
Should we teach kids that all of those hundreds or thousands of gods might be real? No? Why not? Couldn't we be wrong about them not existing? So, if, in fact, one of those gods is real, you have an imperceptibly better chance of telling your children the truth than I do. But if, in fact, all of them are human creations, then you're just confusing them with a bunch of old superstitions....all of which have some pretty crazy ideas about how the world works and how humans ought to treat one another. Sure, some are better than others, and some are more modern than others, but if they aren't true, why confuse kids with odd fictions in the guise of "One Truth"?
We are? OK, I guess that's something to think about. I kinda think it's part of a parents job to decide what young children see and hear. Hard core pornography, extreme violence, cultist propaganda of most kinds, and various forms of hate speech, all fall into the category of "things young children shouldn't have to figure out yet", for me. They'll see/hear it all when they get a little older, and that's OK, but we're talking about the Veggie Tales age group: 3-5 years old, or so.
Yeah, that is the thing I've been disagreeing about.
I don't think "stuff the parent thinks is good/bad" is a reasonable criterion for what a child gets to see or not. It should be the child's decision, with advice from his parent.
The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him. If your child wants to see a religious video despite your advice, then he should see it. If it's full of dumb ideas it won't be very persuasive anyway, right? Certainly not more persuasive than the wise parent..?
What parents don't generally do is have an attitude of trying to get whatever their child likes. They do that "within reasonable limits". Reasonable being a matter of their own judgment. They have preconceived ideas about what shows are bad, and try to avoid their child finding out about them instead of refuting the bad ideas. They fear "bad influences", instead of thinking that the worse an idea is, the less persuasive it is.
One consequence of this attitude is that sometimes children want something, and their parents refuse, supposedly for the child's own good, and the child gets upset. Plenty of parents would, if their kid saw an episode of Veggie Tales (or whatever) and liked and repeated some ideas from it, say "omg the evil christians are polluting his mind" and forbid him from seeing the second episode that he's looking forward to. That's the wrong approach. Keeping people ignorant of ideas you think are bad is not the path to the truth.
Classic. I wish I could be there the day you try to persuade a 3 year old with your ideas. Have you met any young children, ever? You'll have a cantankerous and unhappy 80-pounder on your hands in no time, as they watch crap, consume crap, and learn crap from mainstream television and movies. I'm more laissez faire than most when it comes to kids, as I was raised in a very relaxed household and I think it works out very well in encouraging independent thought, but it's just stupid to imagine that a 3 year old can make wise decisions about their consumption. They simply don't have the knowledge to make reasonable choices, and you've never had the infinite "why?" conversation if you think they do.
I agree with the original post. It's christian propoganda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it never belonged in the mainstream. THAT is why sales of videos never went above 7 million per year. There is no market for a "christian god" with a lot of people. That is the thing he never mentions. His market was limited from the start, and he STILL doesn't see that...
I guess the main lesson I took away was to live well below your means, both in personal life and in business, because you don't know what the future's going to be like. Projected sales of veggietales was way off mark that he kept approving expenses in ventures and territories he wasn't experienced in.
It seems to me that built to last ignores this fact. I have only read the executive summary, so I might be mistaken.
I demand only the highest quality animated vegetables.
It's interesting - the author wasn't pressured by external forces (VCs) to grow big - he wanted to grow big as fast as possible. He didn't grow because of demand but because of his dreams, which is the number 1 reason why he failed. It's strange, too, because he wasn't competing to capture market space; nor was he under any sort of deadline to sell the company at a certain valuation.
If the author had just kept on making veggie tales like he had been doing before he wanted to grow big, the company would have been fine. Veggie tales was a solid product that had everything going for it.
I am unsure how much he prayed about his decisions, but I believe he didn't pray enough and listened to other people too much.
Prayer as a surrogate for decision-making?
He listend to what the world was telling him and his creation was taken away from him. He put his company into the hands of people who didn't care what happened, it was there "job" and they would go out and get another "job" when this job was done.