3/19/2009 - 4:57:43 PM
Boulder Lens
By Jerry W. Lewis
A few good days on the stock market hardly portends a quick end to the recession, and every business owner or nonprofit executive I talk to these days is hunkering down for a long year.
One owner recounted how her staff told her a large and prestigious sale was pretty much in the bag, but when she got back from lunch the deal had gone to a competitor.
"I'll never go to lunch again," she sighed.
Health care, you might think, has built its own immunity to a downturn. Not so, friends in medical practices tell me. As people lose their jobs and health-care insurance, they're putting off elective surgeries, a higher-margin profit center for hospitals. Hip or knee replacements, breast implants and even early warning procedures like colonoscopies and mammograms are being skipped if it means out-of-pocket spending.
I talked to a longtime Boulder jeweler who's selling his store's inventory and retiring. While I bemoaned the loss of the Rocky and troubled times of many newspapers, he vented about online jewelry sites like Blue Nile. Do people really know what they're buying, he wondered? I could sense how his business model always stressed customer loyalty, service and trust, and he wasn't very happy with the rapid growing online competition.
As I was writing this column, I called my parents in Kentucky. My sister had just been laid off from a job she liked at a specialty grocer, which specialized in fresh fruit and gourmet foods and attracted regular customers to its nice deli. With pocketbooks tightening, customers stopped coming in. Are they going to Wal-Mart? Probably.
With forecasters predicting little relief from our economic malaise for most of 2008, the reality is sinking in that we're just not going back to the way things were. And a lot of people I know say that's a good thing.
The companies most likely to feel relief sooner, the thinking goes, are those adapting to new marketplace realities the fastest.
"This economic crisis doesn't represent a cycle. It represents a reset," said General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, addressing a conference on Business for Social Responsibility. "It's an emotional, social, economic reset."
No one can argue there's already much more government involvement in crafting a turnaround. "People who understand that will prosper," Immelt said. "Those who don't will be left behind."
It's not just the big corporations that have to reset. Two local businesses shared how they're viewing the changing times.
"Work with your support system - support leads to ideas and creativity," said Deborah Holvey, who built and sold two businesses, a catering firm and then a dog-care service. She recently launched a new consulting business, emphasizing sustainable best practices.
"Talk with your family, associates, employees and vendors _ tell the truth," Holvey said. "If you have to downsize, transparency will serve you better than hiding."
I've known Kathey Pear for years, and watched her grow and successfully sell her first office furniture company. I watched as she jumped right back in and launched Citron, a furniture dealer with about 16 employees.
"We are really looking at this turbulence as an opportunity," Pear told me, "to trim the fat, slow down, simplify our lives and, hopefully, share something more meaningful. We are all in this together."
Rather than just trying to sell more furniture, Pear started telling clients Citron is committing to all of the product "life cycle," offering sustainable recycling and setting up donations of excess furniture over the past six months as clients had to scale back or even close facilities.
Although there are plenty of places to buy furniture, Pear explained, there was little help at the "bottom end," when you need to get rid of it.
So she launched www.facilitycycle.com, bringing facilities managers, nonprofits, real estate professionals and recyclers together to keep furniture out of landfills. The idea already has been approved as an EPA WasteWise partner.
Whether my friend knew it or not, that's a "reset."
Back to the big guys, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, talking to technology directors of federal agencies, also emphasized the "reset" scenario.
"Essentially, the economy is going to reset to a different level, and then again be propelled by what really should be, and typically are, the fundamental drivers of economic growth _ which are really productivity and innovation."
It will be those innovative ideas that "really make a difference," he predicted, that will get funded within businesses and from venture capitalists and begin to right the ship.
Jerry W. Lewis is a contributing columnist. Reach him by e-mail at jwlboulder@comcast.net. He also writes a blog at www.boulderreport.typepad.com.
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