A Sad Toy Story

I believe that small and mid-sized agencies are well-positioned to take advantage of this economy and the need for high-quality and high-touch marketing efforts. So the news that Toy is closing is sad, because it was one of the higher-profile startups of the last few years. Ad Age has more:

The agency currently employs 10 full-time staffers and a handful of freelancers and is run by a trio of partners, Anne Bologna, Ari Merkin and David Dabill, who met while working at the defunct New York outpost of Fallon.
“Ari and David and I have always been willing to make the tough decisions, this one being the toughest,” Ms. Bologna, Toy’s CEO, told Advertising Age. “Though we’re still profitable, together we realized that we still haven’t reached the scale we’d hoped for, four years into the business. We started, ran and are now closing Toy on our own terms, which, despite its outcome, is something we are deeply proud of.”

I confess I’m a bit confused. If you’re doing good work and you’re profitable, why close simply because you haven’t grown so much? Scale is overrated, in my opinion, even though it does have its advantages.