Bradley Schiller’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece resonated with me. He takes issue with Pres. Obama likening today’s economic circumstance to “the great depression.” I don’t want to quarrel with the president, and that’s not the purpose of my comments.
What I DO want to say is that I totally agree with Schiller’s take on historical data which seem to demonstrate that whatever economic state we are experiencing today, it is NOT a depression and it certainly is not another “Great Depression.”
As entrepreneurs, small business owners, women business owners, business development experts, and other whale hunters, it is time we get on the bandwagon to help negate the overstated gloom and doom that permeates our media.
In conversations today with business owners, the message was this: “We are working much harder today than we had to work 12 months ago to make the same revenue.” That’s not “depression” language. It’s not even hardship language. Taken in context, the message was: if we are very strategic and if we operate efficiently, we can maintain our revenues and profits although it will require more energy to do so.
Big business and government representatives cannot carry the torch of economic recovery, mostly because they are more identified with the problem than with the possible solutions. There is no evidence that the voice(s) of small business were heard during the stimulus package debates. Yet it will be small business that leads the US out of the economic quagmire that we are experiencing today.
What do you think? How is your small business weathering this storm?