This week's cover story tells a tale that every small businessperson dreads: a major customer goes under, leaving you with a bill that amounts to more than 10 percent of your yearly revenue.
The company can't pay bills, lines of credit dry up, vendors won't deliver goods without cash upfront, then the taxman calls. Too often during the Great Recession, the story ended in bankruptcy, with a business gone and jobs lost.
But the story of ParsonsKellogg and founder Thomas Kellogg turned out differently. He retrenched, leaned on family, found new revenue streams, looked to peers for guidance on how to tackle his problems and took a chance – the federal government put a lien on his house thanks to deliberately not paying his taxes – in order to generate new business.
Eventually his business turned around, and this year he's on course to make double the revenue he took in when the recession hit.
Most companies that survived the recession are stronger than ever. Perhaps there are lessons there for all companies, no matter how good business seems to be. •