The longer I am in business, the more I can reflect and draw upon experiences and events of the past 45 plus years. There have been good times and not so good times in business and in personal life.

Managing a business through a rough patch, and there have been a few, can be challenging and exhausting, but there are many lessons to be learned from the adversity.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, said “What does not kill me makes me stronger”. This has become an overused aphorism, but it does accurately portray a picture of the resilience required to overcome adversity.

Every time I play golf, I am reminded of the important lessons learned from a lifetime of ups and downs. Golf is like life played in 18 holes. Everything can be going along smoothly with nice tempo and rhythm, making pars (well maybe not that many pars ☹) and bogeys for several holes in a row, and then Wham – Triple Bogey!

How you respond to this adversity will determine the outcome of the rest of your game. Are you going to dwell on it, wallowing in anger and self criticism, or are you going to regroup, recover and move on, leaving that bad hole behind, staying in the present and focusing on one shot at a time?

Business reverses, like that triple bogey in golf, come along occasionally over a long career, and how you react to each situation matters greatly.

Fortunately for me, unlike the game of golf where you have to figure things out on your own due to the individual nature of the game, in my business life I have been surrounded by smart people who are good at what they do, and can help.

One of my earliest memories of overcoming adversity was the economic recession of the early 80s, almost 40 years ago. Inflation had taken a firm hold on the economy – interest rates on our business loans were in the high teens and low twenty percent range, and my father, our leader, suffered a major heart attack at the age of 67 and was unable to work.

I was 25 at the time, working as a rental counterperson and dispatcher, and had zero knowledge of what it takes to run a company. But I was the owner’s son and people were looking to me for affirmation and direction – leadership. What did I know about leadership? Nothing!

But I did know we had good people and a good name in business. I called a meeting with the key people in the company to talk about what to do going forward. I asked them to tell me what we were doing right, what we were doing wrong, what did they think our key strengths were that we could build on, and I followed the advice they gave me.

We re-focused the business on the core strengths and eliminated lines of business that caused a distraction from what we were known for. We clarified our purpose and simplified the operations in a way that leveraged our knowledge base and kept the message clear and easy for our team and our customers.

Our revenues went down, and we took some losses along the way, but within a year, things began to turn around and the company became more profitable on a lower revenue base. But more important than that, by focusing on our core strengths, our team was energized and confident and happy, doing the things they loved and were good at. Everybody had a clarity of purpose and we were all rowing in the same direction again, creating positive momentum. It was a great feeling, like nothing could stop us.

From this solid base of core business, the company began to grow again and over the next 8 years grew at an annual rate of 25%! Fun and profitable growth ?

And then the next big recession hit in 1991. Another Triple Bogey! But that is a story for another day.

I bet you can guess what we did though.

See you next month.

Doug Dougherty

CEO