Captain's Blog
Next Evolution
L. Marc Adams
I think we would all agree that bringing about one’s own destruction isn’t very smart – although some are twisting this idea – though they themselves aren’t the ones going boom…
I’m sure some would say that this new venture we’ve started is bringing about the destruction of my other business, Digital Vision Works, but I disagree. Others have tried to destroy DVW - some have even speculated that destruction has come from the inside as well, but DVW is still here.
No, I look at this new venture as evolution in action. For years I tried to avoid this evolution both personally and as a business decision that was made at DVW. But evolution will not be denied. It may falter, it may stumble, it may hit a few dead ends, but it keeps moving and according to Darwin and others, it uses natural selection and environmental pressures and ecological niches to come up with something that works.
And if you are set in your ways and don’t change or grow to meet these you will soon find that you and your kind are extinct. If you eat the very last ear of corn without saving any of the seeds to plant in the spring you’re going to get very hungry soon - and possibly even starve. Business models work in similar fashions.
Run all your clients off through either bad service, lousy product or over pricing and you’ll soon be out of business. Let the executives or partners take all the profits out of the company and soon there is no longer anything left to grow the business on or allow it to adjust to a changing market. Result: no more business – extinction.
Seriously, would the government and everyone else be looking at alternative forms of fuel if oil was still being imported and sold at the pumps for 35 cents a gallon? How many companies have we seen that built vertically with better, bigger offices, higher executive salaries, bigger executive bonuses, etc., without strengthening their base’s security, safety and longevity by keeping up with the growing trends and market direction, only to have their ivory towers crumble and collapse?
You may be asking about now, “Marc, how does this apply to DVW…destruction and evolution?”
Well DVW is both recovering and evolving. DVW was started because we saw an opportunity. It was formed to be just a film and video production company, only film or video production. All of our competitors were in one way or another advertising agencies being hired by other advertising agencies to do production work. We wanted to say to the advertising agencies – “hey, here we are and we don’t want to compete against you, so hire us to do your production work”. I figured this was a good way to get business and grow the company and production work in WV in general. Needless to say, even though we did award winning work, this model didn’t quite work out for various reasons. The other companies were still getting hired and more and more often the production business was going out of state. Even the state itself was competing against the business by creating more and more of their own production departments – which our tax dollars help pay for even though it cut into our ability to make a living and provide jobs…. But again I digress.
So, this is a healing process and we’re hopefully going to continue that healing and come out the other side better and stronger than before. In many ways we already are.
So even though some thought we were destroyed - we weren’t. Wounded? Yes. Healing? We’ll have to wait and see, but we’re doing our best.
Market Evolution at Work!