The people are the legacy: Why revenue is a lagging indicator
By Christie Molgaard
We work in live marketing and brand experience. Some days that means a fan zone or a brand activation in front of thousands of strangers. Other days it means an all-hands, a leadership town hall or an internal campaign for an audience who already know each other’s names. Whether you’re speaking to a customer or a colleague, the job is the same: make a moment land and make it matter.
But it’s precisely because our work is live and temporary that the question of legacy matters. If a moment lasts an evening, what’s left when it ends?
For me, legacy isn’t the company you build. It’s what the people around you carry forward. The junior producer who joined us nervous and leaves two years later running her own team. The client who learned, through working with us, that creative ambition and operational rigour aren’t opposites. The suppliers we treated as partners, not afterthoughts. Those are the durable things. Revenue is a lagging indicator of all of it. The numbers tell you the business worked. The people tell you the legacy did.
This reframing matters because it changes what you optimise for. If legacy is people, then how you treat them in the difficult moments, the lost pitch, the cancelled town hall, the project that goes sideways at 2am the night before doors open, is the legacy. Not the showreel.
Sustaining leadership over time is the part I think founders underestimate most. You don’t sustain it. You keep retiring versions of yourself. The leader I needed to be when D&F was four people in a rented room is not the leader I need to be now and won’t be the leader I need to be in three years’ time. Businesses outgrow their founders’ habits faster than founders realise, the leaders who endure are the ones willing to let those habits go.
The other piece is partnership. My co-founder Charlotte and I have built D&F together from the start, sustained leadership is rarely a solo act. Having someone who will challenge your bias and a team who feel safe doing the same, is the difference between leadership that endures and leadership that calcifies. The best protection against your own blind spots is a team who feel free to push back, regardless of where they sit on the org chart.
Then there are values.
Ours at D&F are the three things we hold ourselves to in the work, the team and in every long-term decision we make.
Make moments matter. If something isn’t worth doing properly, it isn’t worth doing. The same standard applies to a stadium activation, a CEO’s town hall script or a thank-you note.
Be useful before you’re impressive. Substance ages better than polish. We’d rather solve the actual problem, whether that’s reaching a hard-to-reach external audience or getting a workforce to genuinely believe a leadership message, than the version that just looks good in a case study.
Protect the people who do the work. The team you build is the one thing you can’t shortcut or outsource. Clients move, contracts end and capabilities can be hired. A team who trust each other, and trusts you, is the single most important thing in business and the hardest to rebuild once it’s gone.
Legacy, in the end, is a question about people. Not what we made, but who we made it with and how. The team who stayed. The clients who came back. The audiences who felt something real and remembered it.
If creating the stories together has as positive an impact on the people who make them as it does on the people they’re made for, we’ve done the work properly.
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