Photograph / NIGEL PARRYWANT TO SEE change coming to
a major industry? Just watch a
little kid in front of a TV.
I did it earlier this sum-
mer. My 4-year-old son and I
were on a JetBlue flight, and
he started flipping around the
in-seat TV channels. This was
a foreign experience for him;
we cut the cord at home, so he’s
grown up with apps like PBS
Kids. Now he had dozens of
live channels at his fingertips,
and he landed on Nickelodeon,
which was also foreign to him.
SpongeBob SquarePants was
on, and he was hooked. Riveted.
Giggly! (Although he thought
SpongeBob was made of cheese.)
Then a commercial break
began.
“What is this?” he asked.
I explained it was a series of
ads. “I don’t want them,” he
said. I said that nobody wants
them, but if he waits for a few
minutes, they’ll go away and
his show will return. “That’s
exhausting,” he said—and
then asked for a phone, so he
could watch streaming videos
uninterrupted. His interest in
SpongeBob was no match for
his disinterest in ads.
Imagine it: An entire gen-
eration will grow up like him,
raised on ad-free environ-
ments and with no patience
for minutes- long blocks
of unwanted interruption.
Advertising agencies and TV
networks surely know this, but
what are they doing about it?
Not enough, as far as I can see.
Television is still running on a
decades-old business model.It’s grasping onto what once
worked. Know who made that
same decision? Blockbuster.
Kodak. Hell, so did the mag-
azine industry—which I can
assure you is now scrambling
to recover.
Change will come to every
business, but there’s an irony
to it: The best time to embrace
change is when you see it com-
ing from far away—when you
still have time to plan, and
when you aren’t hurting. But
that’s also the hardest time to
change. Why leave something
that’s still working? Why invite
the pain? Most businesses sim-
ply can’t find the will to change
until it’s a necessity. But at that
point, it’s often too late.
This is why of all the entre-
preneurs I meet, I’m most
struck by the ones who make
change early. It sounds easy,
but it is so hard in practice.
For example, I think about
Andy Monfried, the founder
and CEO of Lotame. His com-
pany provided an ad buying
service to advertising agencies,
which earned $30 million in
annual revenue. But after a few
years, three agencies told Andy
they were moving on. “I can’t
give you any more money,” he
remembers them saying. “We’re
building what you’re doing at
our agency.”
Andy realized he was in trou-
ble. His company was still prof-
itable, but change was coming.
He’d eventually be outmoded.
In response, he planned to
shut down his advertising busi-
ness and pivot to a new oneinvolving data—but one of his
investors balked. Why close a
profitable business? Why not
use it as a cash cow, and let it die
a slow death while building the
next thing? But Andy disagreed.
“Cash cows are the death of a
business,” he told me, “because
you can never starve a cash cow.
Needs and resources will always
gravitate toward it. So you’re
better off to amputate.”
That’s what he did. He laid
off half his company, used the
remaining team to reinvent
Lotame, and then built it back
up as a data company that serves
a completely different clien-
tele. “It was an emotional expe-
rience, and I had doubts all the
way through,” he admits. But
he knew it was his only choice.
Today, he’s been proven right:
Lotame is bringing in far more
than the $30 million in reve-
nue he once sacrificed. By actingearly, Andy saved his company.
This is what it means to
be proactive. We can’t wait
for change; we have to be the
change. And yes, we’ll create
some anguish along the way. We
might feel crazy and risky and
reckless. But we’re ultimately
inviting short-term pain for
long-term gain—which, frankly,
is far better than the alterna-
tive. If you want to see what that
looks like, just keeping watching
the TV.
But my son? I suspect he
won’t be watching.Jason Feifer
[email protected]
@heyfeifer
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Will you change, or will you be forced to change?8 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2019