The 2009 Banking Collapse Was Great for Business

This story has a good ending... Back in 2009 as the economy was tumbling, I was nervous about where business was headed. How would the banking collapse impact small businesses? How long would it last? What did it mean? So I called my colleague, Bill, who had worked in the NYC financial world, and asked his advice.

In an almost Yoda-like voice he gave me advice I will always remember. He said "Get to the new way of thinking as quickly as you can..." Ominous. At first I was puzzled. What did this mean? What was the old way? And what was the new way? And how fast was I supposed to make this change?

Bill explained there is the V-economy (quick recovery), U-ecomony (slow but eventual return) and the ever-dreaded L-ecomony (it's going down and staying down). And as we now know, that's exactly what happened. An L-economy. Which meant the money stopped moving.

When Bill said "get to the new way of thinking" what hel really mean was "down size, stop spending, and seek cover."  The sub text of his advice was "get resourceful". As a website company the old way we did business changed almost overnight. 

What did this mean? Instead of hiring people to do the work (the old way), I picked up books and started teaching myself skills I needed to keep producing. Especially since I had created BringIt Sign Up Sheets -- people were starting to use it, and bugs were being reported-- but no longer had money to hire programmers, writers and developers to fix things. I needed a plan. So I learned HTML and CSS and partnered with Charles Forcey (founder of Historicus and all-around genius) for the complex backend development. 

Something amazing happened. We started making better websites. When the cost of development was our personal time -- and our ability to learn the skills we needed -- we got smarter about our choices. It taught us to think small, reduce risk, release often, and solve only what is critical -- this was the new way of thinking.