savings account.
I wondered what we were most attached to that I could cut out right now. Our kids’ private school? Our newly renovated cottage? Our house? The family skiing lifestyle in Collingwood? Our family membership at the Granite Club?
I added it all up in my head. Cutting these six items still left us with $120,000 of fixed, annual operating expenses, after tax. We hadn’t cut out enough, I thought, processing the multi-tiered lifestyle that I had taken for granted. I’ve earned it, I protested to myself. I still want it. Do I need it? Do I even like it? I continued sparring with myself, without any definitive answers. The life of privilege that we had built now looked like a heavy load that could take me down emotionally and financially.
We were going to need another whole redesign of how we would now live, and soon. We had let things get away on us; our life was now controlling us as opposed to our controlling it.
A good money manager would say we were over-extended for my risk profile. It was time to press the reset button.
A kite rises against the wind
rather than with it.
—UNKNOWN
October 16, 2008
Our firm is part of a global executive search network called IMD. In mid-October I attended the twice-a-year conference along with 40 other colleagues who ran similar firms in various parts of the world. This time it was in beautiful Prague.
Fear was palpable at the meeting. Leading markets, such as the United States, England, and France had declined further than ours, a sign of things to likely come our way. Some Eastern European nations, especially the Czech Republic and Hungary, were in the worst shape, and negative reports were coming in from Russia. Spain’s economy was in a shambles. I was shaken by the magnitude of the declines in some of our most important markets. I was struggling with a 35 percent decline, and some of my international colleagues were having a near-death experience: Their business was going down 50-90 percent.
I don’t have many personal relationships with direct Canadian competitors. Discussions with these global colleagues gave me a frame of reference on the extreme conditions we might face at home, solidifying my belief that we were heading straight for the abyss.
On the flight back, I started to prepare for a speaking engagement on talent management for the Marketing Agency Association Worldwide global conference, which was taking place in Toronto on October 20. The attendees were managing directors, presidents, and CEOs of marketing services businesses, for the most part privately held, and most were owners. I had been booked by David Ploughman, CEO of BSTREET and president of MAAW, nine months prior, a time when everything seemed perfect, when managing and recruiting talent was a top priority for CEOs. As I dusted off my materials to make some edits, I was confronted with the now irrelevance of my presentation. What had been topical in January was worthless in October.
A War Story
With the blessing of the conference organizer, I scrapped my original and instead presented a war story of how my partners and I had led our own firm in the previous two recessions, segueing into what we were going to do in this current one.
As I rewrote the presentation, I did a critical review of my decisions, key lessons, and with my leadership style when I was under duress. It became clear that each recession had left me scarred personally, the first culminating in a divorce and the second in weight gain. I also realized that when the economy was at its grimmest, it was a new vision for the business, focused on innovation and new services that had ultimately got us out of the muck, while some of our competitors were going out of business.
Equally important, I had found a way to inspire myself by participating in the creation of a project bigger than my own business in terms of its potential impact for the community. As it turned out, conversations about that project gave me the opportunity to build relationship capital with key decision makers that would later turn into business transactions.
In effect, I was getting face time, even though my core business wasn’t needed or wanted. The net effect was that we rebounded much faster when the economy finally turned. In 1991 I had co-created Skate for Kids with our founder Harold Perry and my colleague Stephen Milic, a project that enrolled 30 companies and that has since become an annual event with $800,000 in net funds raised. In 2002 I co-founded Marketing Hall of Legends (MHOL) with Jim Warrington of the American Marketing Association, which has inducted more than 50 iconic Canadians for lifetime marketing achievements. MHOL now has a multi-tiered legacy program, mentoring marketers on the rise and giving back to charities in need. Thousands of executives have attended the event and contributed their wisdom through the Mentor Exchange program. I realized that these projects were as important to me as a legacy as my core business was.
I finished my presentation with the simple statement that I needed to find a challenge, a project of some sort that could handle my sorrows.
Preparing for the conference had reminded me of how I could get out of out of the funk my business and I were in. These two initiatives had helped me accelerate the business when markets finally rebounded. I should do the same again.
At work we restructured and shelved programs, and at home we cut what we could. While it wasn’t the picture I had imagined of my life at 44 years of age, so it went. Now, on a new, leaner financial diet, I needed to turn to myself and find my challenge.
November 2008
Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.
—LILY TOMLIN, ACTRESS
In mid-November I slowly shifted my focus to the things I could control. I decided I was ready for a breakthrough that would help me stop feeling helpless and victimized by the economy. I decided that 2009 would end with the successful achievement of these objectives:
1. Get fit.
Why not finish 2009 the fittest I’d ever been? I asked myself. I could use the stamina to deal with business issues.
2. Change my life scorecard.
Since work had defined more of who I was than anything else, I needed a new scorecard to help me avoid getting sucked into the negative vortex of what was becoming the toughest year at work in 20 years. Work would be important but not define me. I decided to find out, in 2009, what would define me.
3. Be positive.
I decided to create affirming conversational capital to inspire myself, my staff, and the desperate people I interviewed every day.
4. Reinvent the business.
I committed to finding quiet time to partly withdraw from the day-to-day in order to focus on innovation in an industry that had gone unchanged for 40 years.
5. Help my community’s less fortunate.
Being empathetic and shedding a tear was good; mobilizing to have an impact, better.
As for what would define me, instead of
