For Net consultant, a crisis, then a silver lining
Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.
It's disastrous when 80 percent of your business's revenue suddenly and unexpectedly vanishes, right?
Not exactly. Well, at least not for Steve Borsch, half owner of Marketing Directions. The consultant, whose Connecting the Dots practice advises companies on how to use blogs, forums, and social networks to engage with customers, is about as focused on the silver lining as he is on the clouds.
The precipitous decline of his main work became the impetus to make changes he hadn't even realized were necessary, said Borsch, a married father of two who works in Eden Prairie, Minn.
Steve Borsch
(Credit: Steve Borsch)"There's a lot of pain and a lot of agony, but I felt greater clarity for me personally in the last 45 to 60 days than I have in the last couple years," said Borsch, 52. "There's this survivalist instinct. You cut to the chase. You forget the crap around the edges. You home in on the value you're trying to deliver."
And the shock waves traversing the economy also open up new possibilities, just as they did two generations earlier when the industrialization of the United States led Borsch's grandfather to a coveted job on the Great Northern Railway.
"There was a mad scramble among young people to get jobs that would allow them to move to the city. All these stories about how things were shifting, changing, moving off the farm--people living during that time were in great angst," Borsch said. "My personal opinion is we're living that same time."
Borsch didn't lose his job, but his tale holds value for those who have, or for those who want to make something better of their current position. The recession's consequences led Borsch through shock and some self-doubt to what he's convinced is a better direction.
Borsch works far from the coastal hubs where technology such as Twitter is better known, but he's been in the computing industry almost exclusively since getting his MBA, and he's a firm believer in the communication transformation the Internet enables. His specialty has been to help companies brainstorm about how to build a new, more social phase of Internet interaction with customers, moving beyond old-school methods such as mass marketing e-mail toward more personal discussions such as hosted comment boards.
The idea has appeal well beyond early-adopter companies such as Google or Amazon.com that are comfortable with the online world and familiar with how the Internet can bowl over barriers of geography.
But, Borsch found out, a project to build a fancy new interactive Web site also is expendable when a bad recession hits. Two big contracts evaporated.
Stage 1: Shock
"It was this jaw-dropping oh-my-God...I was stunned," he said of his reaction. "One had a budget that was supposed to be approved to start September 2. The budget still hasn't been approved. With the other one, they made a decision not to move forward with the initiative."
The result, combined with two smaller contracts also being canceled as those companies went into "scramble mode," is that Borsch's revenue dropped by about 80 percent in less than two months.
His immediate response involved an unprintable expletive, then moved to self-doubt, then to a more constructive phase.
"Did I not do something correctly? Could I have done something differently? I immediately started to analyze what I did or didn't do," he said. "It took me a bit of time and a couple conversations to realize it didn't matter if I were Deloitte," a well established and vastly larger consulting firm.
Stage 2: What can you control?
After that came a more positive attitude.
"Most of this is out most of our control," he said of the global economic travails and the toll they take. "First I was pissed at George Bush for his laissez-faire attitude toward regulation," but then he became more assertive. "There are a lot of things you can't control, but what you can control is your reaction to it."
That led to the constructive phase. Specifically, Borsch concluded the service he was providing was becoming less valuable as cutting-edge Internet technology matured into a better understood phenomenon.
Stage 3: What can you do that's valuable?
"I came to the realization that I had to find tools to take what I'm doing and make it smarter," Borsch said.
He decided he needed to help companies not just set up technology for online engagement, but to integrate that better with corporate operations and measure how well it's actually doing. That means not just explaining the ups and downs of user forums, but also managing communication campaigns, rating the influence of particular individuals, integrating with customer relationship management software, and figuring out directly how a community site contributed actual revenue.
"Clients don't need to understand what's happening in the social-media space," Borsch said. "They're saying, 'How do I reach it, how do I get results?'"
And of course, there were belts to be tightened. "It's amazing how much you can defer. There are a lot of (areas) like direct mail where we have now discovered some other methods of getting the word out digitally that don't cost any money or are very minimal investments," he said.
A new phase
So what comes next? The chaos is starting to settle down into a new direction. One big choice is whether to drop his beloved "lone wolf" lifestyle, always looking for new trends, or to head for a more operational job within some corporation.
But it looks like the new analytical, numeric approach to his old practice is the leading contender. "I'm trying to figure out how I can turn this back into a significant growth opportunity, because I love it," he said.
Borsch has more leeway that thousands who've been more directly hit by the recession. His advice to take the bull by the horns, though, is germane to just about anyone.
"Wherever there's great flux, there's great opportunity. It puts everybody on pins and needles, on the edge of their seats, looking for other ways to do whatever it is. Whenever people are like that, they are willing to listen in ways they never had before. I find that to be incredibly empowering and ripe with possibility," he said. "That's what's giving me my optimism."
Next in the series: A young worker caught up in Circuit City's liquidation frenzy
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
None of the financial meltdown had anything to do with the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act... the Clinton administration's HUD Secretary Cuomo and AG Reno's threats to prosecute banks that did not hit mandatory thresholds for mortgages to those whose credit-ratings would not allow normal underwriting... the use of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a piggy bank for Democrat bigwigs like Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, etc...
I've got an idea: let's but Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in charge of the current bailout! What could possibly go wrong with that?
Well said and I could not possible improve upon your statements.
...and Bingo has been called, ladies and gentlemen!
When Intel (or at least my little piece of it) got all panicky and decided to shed contracts (including the one I had there), I was shocked at first.
Now I'm damned glad it happened... it gave me the boost I needed to get out there and start really looking - I found a company that is 10x better to work for (which is tough, since Intel is pretty excellent to work for in and of itself), and I found a much, much nicer salary out of the deal (as in - a 30% raise). To top it off, I got to shed the mountain of policy and bureaucracy that can be endemic to a large corp.
...but that's the trick - instead of complaining when something goes bad, you roll up your sleeves and start looking. I literally found the lead to my current position within hours of being told @ my old position that the contract I had with 'em was going to get killed. (FWIW, my former manager got chucked into the pool less than two weeks afterward... and he was an FTE. IIRC he did find another position as well, though).
I am very grateful that God saw fit to set me up like that, and that I didn't have to spend weeks or months searching about. That said, I never would have found it if I had just sat there and shook my fist, whining and complaining, you know?
/P
The information here does sort of point out the obvious. There are basically two reactions to this economic down turn; either whine about it and do nothing or, as others have pointed out, roll up your sleeves and do something.
These hard economic times force us to do some of the necessary soul searching, house cleaning and getting down to basics that we should do anyway. It's nice to read about someone who did that and benefited from it.
- by lepton80 December 15, 2008 10:38 AM PST
- Well fortitude is like unemployment benefits--it runs out after awhile.
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- by Penguinisto December 15, 2008 12:21 PM PST
- ...only if you allow it.
- Like this
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(7 Comments)/P