I recently attended the Economic Forecast Dinner, hosted by EDASC. This event has been brought to the business community for many years and it is highly attended and anticipated. With all that has been going on of late, economically, this year’s attendance was impressive at just over 560.
This year, given our name change, we decided to become one of the sponsors. Don Wick, in his usual fashion, gave us great recognition. He is one of the best, if not the best, business promoter in Skagit County and is an asset to us all. The keynote speaker was Jim Paulsen, Ph.D., chief investment strategist for Wells Capital Management and a regular on CNBC and Bloomberg Television.
I very much enjoyed his talk as it had a light tone mixed in with powerful facts. He stated that we are not seeing anything different economically than we have historically. What we are seeing however is unprecedented fear. He said “yes, we are in a nasty recession, we are not near a depression,” and I paraphrase; but because of this fear people/businesses are essentially frozen. We are not feeling confident enough to make decisions to purchase and/or moving forward with our business plans.
Much of this fear issue was created by the news media. Everyday for months they have been telling us how bad it is. We just went through a political campaign where each candidate told us how bad we have it. We are seeing huge layoffs in our largest industries. Banks and large financial institutions are failing and we are seeing unprecedented fraud. OK, that all does sound bad, but the other point he made is every decade financial institutions fail – what about the savings and loan failures of the 1980’s. The other point was that 93% of us are still working and we need to pay attention to the 93%, to help them feel confident as well.
When he made that point, something clicked in me – as much as we need to take care of our employees, we need to take care of our customers. This is a point that I always try to make with our clients. Take care of the customer first. They are the reason you are in business and probably the reason you are able to stay in business. This could be just touching base with them to know that you are still here to serve them. If you disappear (visually) in these kinds of times, they might think you have disappeared like the companies that are being displayed as failures through the media.
So I do have one regret for the evening. I really thought to stand up and ask him, “Are you saying that, in order to get this country back, what we need is a great marketing program to get people confident again?” but it seemed a little self-serving.
We see and talk to our customers every day. We are all tentative yet we keep moving forward. Don’t fall into to the fear factor trap. Innovation is always strongest following times of recession. After all, recession and necessity breed innovation and invention. And that’s nothing to be scared about.