Minor economic downturns sometimes inspire nostalgia: a wistful yearning among businesspeople for times when life was easier and more profitable. But what about full-on recessions like the one we’re in right now? Those can bring back memories of a completely different kind. Many executives are feeling a stomach-knotting sense of déjà vu.
In July 2001, former marketing manager Mary Leonard was concocting the first truffles for her new artisan-chocolate company Chocolat Celeste. The economy had already begun to go sour in March of that year. But like everyone, she was taken aback by the events of that autumn.
“The real downturn happened the day after I bought my equipment, on 9/11,” she recalls. “Before that, my chocolates were going to be in all the Marshall Fields stores. After that, they weren’t. So it became a different business than I originally wanted it to be.”
Christmas was fast approaching, and Leonard knew her business would depend heavily on gift purchases. At the time, she had a few corporate buyers lined up, but she didn’t yet have a storefront and she had to scramble to find an outlet for her wares. She placed her high-end confections in Kowalski’s, France 44 Liquors, and Whole Foods. Her quick thinking carried her through until she was able to open her St. Paul store just in time for Valentine’s Day 2002.
Anita Janssen, partner at Maxxum, Inc., a computer recycling and IT lifecycle management firm in Rush City, was also heading a new company in 2001. Unfortunately, she doesn’t feel she handled that recession very well.
“The challenges we faced at the time had a lot to do with the maturity of the company and the maturity of myself as a leader,” she says. “Quite frankly, I had not experienced anything like that in my new career, and I was just completely unprepared to deal with it. So in 2001, when things started slowing down, I had a wait-and-see attitude. Then 9/11 hit, and it was really a dramatic and instantaneous adjustment for the negative. I didn’t react quickly enough, and I didn’t make the cuts and hard decisions quickly enough.”
The company survived, but only just. So what about this new challenge?
More than seven years later, as the economy slumps again, these comp-anies are experiencing the crisis very differently—not just because their companies are at a different stage of development, but also because every recession has its own unique character. Different industries are affected, and there is not the outright freeze in purchasing, travel, and other business activities that happened after the September 11 attacks. The difference is especially palpable for companies like Triad, a Minnetonka business that specializes in corporate events and event marketing.
