You’re the Boss: Waiting for a Recovery

Thinking Entrepreneur

An owner’s dispatches from the front lines.

I have been selling a very popular poster in my frame shop over the last few months. It is a reproduction of a recently rediscovered poster that was printed in England before World War II, but was never distributed. It says “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and it has become quite popular all over the world. I think it’s good advice for dealing with fear, especially for small-business owners.

When I started my business right out of college, I had a lot of fears: of not having enough sales, of signing a lease, of having made a bad career choice. As the business has grown, I have learned that there are many other things to fear: cash flow problems, bad receivables, embezzlement, employee lawsuits, government offices, recessions, accidents and product liability, to name a few. That’s the bad news. The good news, to paraphrase Neitzsche, is that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

Fear is not all bad. It keeps us on our toes. But it also puts people out of business who can’t or won’t make tough choices. I have seen many once-successful companies go broke. Companies go out of business for all sorts of reasons, but there are times, perhaps like now, when it is tempting to become very conservative, when it can seem too dangerous to take the risk of spending money to improve your business. Sometimes, though, in a competitive world, being overly conservative can prove as dangerous as being reckless.

Three years ago, many business owners were afraid they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills and weather the storm. Today, many of us fear that the storm has done too much collateral damage, and things are not going back to the way they were. I talk to many people in business who are still waiting for a recovery, and they are starting to look at their businesses in a different light. They don’t know if they are more afraid of doing nothing or of doing the wrong thing. They’ve never been through anything like this — who has? But difficult times can create interesting opportunities.

My plan for 2009 was to get to 2010. Mission accomplished. At some point, knowing there can be opportunities in a bad economy, I got back to looking for ways to improve my businesses. I bought a new building. It meant laying out a lot of cash at a time when that wasn’t easy. While it’s a much better facility, on a cash-flow basis, I’ve had to put a lot of money into it. One thing I’ve learned: when you buy a big building — this one is 85,000 square feet — you buy a big roof. Mine leaked. It cost a lot to fix.

My home furnishings store has been doing more and more business on the Web, so I seized the opportunity to redo its Web site. Again, I have no doubt the investment will pay off — eventually. I also started manufacturing a new line of photo frames, and I took out a booth at a gift show in Atlanta this month to introduce them. We did about a tenth of the business we expected, but we learned some things.

It was the first time we had gone to this show, and we didn’t have realistic expectations. Next time, we will go to the New York show instead; our frames are better suited for a more contemporary market. Am I afraid that the new line isn’t going to work? No. We went to the wrong show at the wrong time. I have gotten pretty good at determining when something can be fixed and when I am being delusional. This can be fixed. But I’m not sure how many more opportunities I can afford to seize before the economy turns.

There comes a time in business that you don’t look down, you don’t look back, and you just move forward. Am I where I wanted to be at this time? No. But I still believe that my recent investments will pay off. The results are not going to show up on this year’s financials, but I’m confident that in the long run, I’ll be better off than I was before the melt down.

Again, whatever doesn’t kill you …

9:40 a.m. | Correction A previous version of this post misstated the message in the British poster. (Thanks to the commenters who pointed out the error.)

Jay Goltz owns five small businesses in Chicago.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dbd639e86d12ad8419058e8fffa2a5aa