We might have suffered a stroke, but now our vitals look good.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 06/27/10)

So here we are nearing the end of the 2nd quarter of the year. How would I characterize the health of our company this year? It's been like a person with some health problems. It might have had a mild stroke even. It suffered from poor circulation to the brain and extremeties. Chills. Cold sweats. Anxiety attacks. It sought the advice from other patients. (That own companies too.) Got a lot of second opinions.

Needless to say it's been a nail-biting blur. It's somewhat miraculous that we've hung on this year. Lots of companies haven't been able to. The 1st quarter was marked by doubt, contingencies, worst-case scenarios, new business calls and emails, meetings, and a LOT of time spent on LinkedIn. I'm happy to say our perspiration and perseverence is bearing fruit.

Somehow we managed to turn the tide on what we saw as a near-total shutdown of our clients' marketing activity for the first 4 months of 2010. Then in May we started to get email RFPs for new jobs from current (but inactive) clients. We lobbied one client that markets 5 different membership clubs to "get out there with some new creative". We suggested a mid-June meeting to show new concepts.

We then spent nearly a month leading up to that meeting coming up with 13 direct mail concepts that the 5 marketing managers would consider mailing to their lists. The meeting went well, lots of nods and smiles, and while we switched gears to other business activity, we wondered how many they'd choose. Or if they'd decided to go with some other creative vendor.

Then the emails started to trickle in. One manager wanted 1. Another wanted 3. Another wanted 2, and so on. Final tally as of this blog entry: 10 out of the 13 were chosen to be produced and mailed in the 3rd quarter. My business partner and I did a lot of high-fiving last week, let me tell you.

And more work has come in from other formerly inactive clients that came out of the marketing woodwork.

And now it's looking like billing for 3Q alone will make up for our losses in 1Q and 2Q. Amazing. As a friend and colleague says, when you run your own business you're always a phone call away from being overwhelmed. And as I always say, that's a good problem to have.