Great Recession

It was finally getting better.

I mean, look at the Great Recession.

So hit around 2008 or so.

Unemployment peaked in 2010.

And I'd say this is probably another good segue is it was 2008.

It was the start of the Great Recession.

Lehman Brothers had declared bankruptcy and here I'm going to leave the company I've been at for seven years to go do something on my own because I kind of had this insatiable desire to go do something on my own, but it was terrible timing.

So what was I'm trying to remember, like what what was exactly happening in the you know, a lot was going on very fast at that time.

I think that was a tenant of ours that we stuck to.

And that meant that we'd put up a lot of non-refundable earnest money in order to control the land.

But also during that time period, you know, it was the middle and towards the latter part of the Great Recession.

landowners knew that there weren't a lot of options and they didn't have, you know, a half a dozen or a dozen parties waiting in line to buy their land.

How have you been able to do that for so long, and how do you prepare for those times as an owner, both mentally and also financially?

Well, I can't really claim that I did for the Great Recession.

It was extraordinarily brutal financially.

And I actually don't know that any amount of prep financially would have made it less brutal.

But I never really took it and applied it to myself and how I approached the daily world.

It was more like how I thought about success or how I thought about the next deal.

And the Great Recession changed all that.

And all of a sudden, I realized, well, I'm completely...

Two studies, both in Harvard Business Review.

The first used Bain data out of about 3,500 companies through the Great Recession.

The ones that prepared grew their earnings about 17% a year.

The ones that didn't grew about 4%.

And I'm like, could you guys make it four-point or five-point so that we could read it if we tried? I know that we're not going to try, but let's – And that's where, if there's that much verbiage, then you're going to ask yourself, why are there so many notes on this credit card application? What is it they're telling me?

Yeah, the psychological term that jumped out at me when you were talking about that credit card experience, which after the Great Recession, they... made those types of sign up to get a T-shirt, sign up to get a pizza.

Those were no longer allowed.

But when I was going to college, they certainly were.

And there's some history there.

You know, going through the Great Recession, you saw districts and schools across our nation, when budgets get tight, often the fine arts is the first thing that gets cut.

And in Palm Beach County, our school board has always valued the arts.

So they've kind of protected it and continued to fund it.

Like my husband could lose his job.

You know, you just once you live through the Great Recession, right, or people that live through the Great Depression, like it really does stay with you.

Right.

You just don't want to be in that situation again.

college undergrad.

So I was immediately in the job market and the bottom fell out from the markets and we were suddenly in the Great Recession.

And I had a I just started a job as an account manager and I was only there a couple months that specialized in background um screens for employers and so mass layoffs became part of the equation because employers were not hiring at that time yeah So I had this innate sense of wanting to always have a backup and realizing that there were always going to be potential market disruptions, market forces, the economy was going to ebb and flow, that layoffs would likely, you know, could happen again at some point in my career.

And they did.