If you’ve ever heard of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber, you probably know about one of the most popular Christian animation series ever produced – the VeggieTales. VeggieTales is a creation of Big Idea, a company started by Phil Vischer about twenty years ago. As interesting as his creative ideas is the story of the rise and eventual fall of Big Idea.
I encourage you to read the account by Phil Vischer here and consider the lessons to be learned from his experience.
As you’ll read, Vischer experienced first-hand what Inc. Magazine researchers had identified as threat number one to growing companies - “No Man’s Land.” According to Vischer’s posts, “No Man’s Land is a treacherous period in any business's growth when a company finds itself ‘too big to be small yet too small to be big.’…Small companies, experiencing rapid initial growth, attempt to make the leap to being ‘big’ without having a clear plan for sustaining that growth.” The below excerpt from Vischer’s account illustrates this concept.
As soon as we returned from the holidays, I called the leaders together and posed a simple question: “What exactly are we building here?” 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.
Clearly, the company had a problem, as many do who do not properly manage their growth. As with the VeggieTale episodes, I think we can all learn a lot from this story.