There was only one problem. We had no clients, and even worse, we had no portfolio of previous work with which to convince a new client to choose us. We were confronting the oldest problem in business or wars: how to gain a toehold on someone else’s territory.

In business, most people usually don’t have to confront this issue because most new ventures are actually spinoffs of existing ventures and thus have their own established client base from the start. Often an account exec and creative director will leave an ad agency, bringing a few of the key accounts with them. Or a group of software engineers will leave a big company and immediately start in business supporting the software of the very company they left.

We, unfortunately, didn’t leave any large company to take clients from. We had nothing.When attempting to establish a beachhead in war, there are two ways to succeed. One is to mass incredibly superior forces and just storm the enemy’s strong point, as the Allies did at Normandy.

The business equivalent of this, in our case, would have been to hire away incredibly talented creative people and highly aggressive account execs and start running large ads in Advertising Age and the New York Times business section announcing that our new Wunderkind agency was looking for business. In World War II, the Normandy assault was a key military victory, but it drained the coffers and arsenal of democracy. And, while launching a first-class agency might be somewhat less expensive, it was far beyond my limited savings from summer hot dog sales.

The second way to succeed is by doing something that seems completely irrelevant to the conflict but that distracts the object of your ambitions so you can infiltrate and attack from within. This is what happened at Troy with the Trojan Horse. Dazzled by the earlier offering from two armies, the citizens of the city took the beautiful horse in, unaware there was an army secreted within it.