My Days of .Com
Future of Interactive Advertising

Recession as the Status Quo

Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 ( 4 responses )
Tags: money, recession, status quo, value, vision

Two years ago I’ve started my business with no capital. Just hard work and decent reinvestment of the profit. No credit, no investor, no nothing. I was knocking on the doors, meeting 3-5 clients a day, getting a new one every week. It was hard work and I had to do everything. I designed, developed, sold, invoiced, managed the account, report, met the client. Everything.

In two months it was too hard for me to do it all by myself and I had to work with a colleague freelancer, mr. Buga who later became a partner in the company. Andrei was the first actually, even before Alex, and we formed a nice little team. We had lots of fun together and launched some pretty cool projects.

… But cash was hard to get and every penny was carefully managed to pay the rent, the salaries, the incentives and others. I had many sleepless nights wondering how will I manage to get the payments in time, pay the salaries and keep everybody happy and motivated.

I always thought that, with time, it gets easier. It doesn’t. These game is not for the weak. There is always something that keeps you awake at night and there is always something that doesn’t go according to plan. But I had something that kept me going.

That was my promise to myself and to the world that someday we will be the best Interactive Agency in the world. It was the hope and the dream that kept me going. It was every campaign, website or product we’ve launched and every time we got together and congratulated each other on the work we’ve done, only to start again next day.

It was NOT the money. It never is. Businesses (and Interactive Agencies are businesses) are ran by people. Not by money. They are build with hard work. Not with money. They offer the world ideas, satisfaction and solve problems. It sounds idealistic but it isn’t. Check the economy manuals. Money is virtual. The thing that matters is value and value is not affected by the recession. It survives bubbles, it survives recession.

You see, some people, like me, think of recession as the status quo. Because, in the words of Steve Jobs you must “stay hungry, stay foolish”.