Blog > Making our own weather

04 December 2008

Just this week we've heard of two web agencies in trouble... at least one of them is gone for good. It reminds me of the time Semantic flat-lined. Summer 2002.

The truth is that we played a lot of golf that summer... there wasn't much else going on. The office was dead, disturbed only by flies and tumbleweed. It certainly wasn't disturbed by a ringing phone. The only calls were from the Bank Manager, wondering who had died.

He was right in a way. The web market had collapsed. We were still doing odds and sods for existing Clients, but coming into work felt strangely like arriving at a wake.

But we learned a lot. We learned that running a business in a falling economy is like sailing in light winds... way harder than normal, but ultimately rewarding.

I learned the real meaning of commitment - talking your wife into risking the family home will do that. It's a conversation that gets serious real fast - so you'd (damn well) better be committed. And that wasn't all. We learned how to stick to our principles, how to support clients with their own problems, and how to keep cheerful. And finally we learned the value of that oft-repeated (and oft-ignored) phrase... "cash is king". (In fact it's not king, it's way more important than that. During that long hot summer it was water - dribbling away).

These days I think of that time as Semantic's right of passage. We'd had it easy until then, and Semantic was a young, cocky business that thought it had all the answers. But that summer we were set some grown-up challenges. 'Quit bragging', the economy said,'show me if you've got what it takes'.

It was touch and go for a while as things got worse. The flies died of boredom. I became almost good at golf... it was that serious. At one point I said to Mike, 'We have two more weeks to get this right'.

I won't bore you with our recovery, except to say that in some ways the real Semantic was born that day. The lessons learned during that lean period have kept us lean, strong and careful ever since.

There are way worse things in life than going out of business, but surviving harsh times brings it's own rewards. Perhaps that's a small crumb of comfort to those who are finding things tough right now. The outlook may seem dismal but my advice is to be great anyway, be happy anyway... deliver the best work you can anyway.

Screw the outlook. Good companies will survive... and great companies get to make their own weather.

(These days my golf is heroically, awe-inspiringly bad... and that's something to be proud of.)

Posted by Nick Warren at 5:57 PM