John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. This story is part of a longer interview from 2010. John talks about the risks of going downmarket to get clients when the economy turns bad.
You can listen to the story here (1:48).
Transcript:
I will have been in business 35 years on June 1. I've seen a number of economic cycles. There's good times and there's bad times. One lesson that keeps coming back and was proven again in 2009, which was not an easy year: there is always a tendency to go downmarket in bad times, so you have revenue coming in the door, so you don't have to lay off people.
It hurts, because even unsophisticated clients who don't pay as much, they're still going to require an enormous amount of time. And, in down times, you're still going to run the risk of them not paying you. And we ran into that in 2009. It didn't hurt us badly, but it hurt.
If we took 5 clients that we wouldn't normally have taken, I wish we'd only taken, say, 2 of those. Because that we could have absorbed that more easily. So that's another lesson.
At the time, it's tough to remember that, when you see your base clients reducing their fees. And you're reading scary economic headlines. You feel, any business almost is good business.
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