Writing my résumé is something I find particularly difficult, whenever I get to the part about running a business.

Five million dollars of good times

I was twenty-eight when I took over a five-million dollar manufacturing business in Houston. It was a very old, established firm (founded 1870). It sold its goods to oil companies which were based in Houston.

Under previous management, it had been drifting, which I knew; but I was confident that I could turn that around. What couldn't have been forseen was how unprepared the business was to weather a serious downturn.

Good times had been so good for so long, based upon the ever-rising price of crude oil. Houstonians—dogged optomists? or intoxicated by prosperity?—actually believed that the price would never—could never—go down. "The more oil we take out of the ground, the more scarce it will be," an oil-company scion gushed, "The price of a barrel of crude can only go up!" Very few Houstonians made provision for the price going down.

Young scions of old families, who should have known better, borrowed vast sums at high interest-rates (remember the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s?) in order to purchase tracts of suburban land. They planned to profit from the inevitable, petroleum-fuelled, expansion of the city's population. They funded the loans with the cash-flow of their petroleum-related businesses, a cash-flow which was as reliable as the price of a barrel of sweet crude oil.

The mortal storm

Less than a year after I took over, the region was hit, like a hurricane, by a recession—the worst in living memory, more severe for the region than the Great Depression. In a very short few weeks in 1983 the price of oil dropped down and down and down. This was very good news for the parts of the United States which consume oil, but a calamity for Texas and Louisiana. No business, great or small, was spared.

The big problem was, the customers were going out of business. Every morning I'd sift through the mail; every morning there would be more and more bankruptcy notices in the pile. Collections—which had never been a problem before—became a major issue.

Suddenly, the company's debt, which at the time I took over seemed manageable, turned into the monster in the cloakroom, growling and threatening to get out and eat up the rest of the business.

Not to survive but to win

This situation presented not just a business challenge, but a tough personal challenge too. It's extremely unpleasant to try to run a business in a recession. It's depressing—it's a bummer. Very hard to keep one's spririts up.

For a businessman, it's very hard to admit that it's beyond one's control. People go into business to make money, it's true; but they also believe that they can control the world around them, shape it to their vision. When it doesn't respond to their touch, it's like a defeat—they feel bad. People go into business not to survive, but to win.

Eventually I found a way out, by soliciting business nationally; but it was a very bumpy ride and scary too, since I was betting the company. The company was a corporation, which meant that I wasn't only risking my own capital, but that of shareholders. It made for some lively stockholders' meetings: I was never very sure what the outcome would be. There was never a day that I went to work when my heart was not in my mouth.

Another such victory

After I had turned things around, and then sold the business, I felt no elation. Only relief. I emerged, not in glory but covered in grit, tired, with my nose bloodied. In business, there is only one standard for success, profit, and lots of it: shareholders don't care that a manager has saved their investment from loss, they only want to know whether he (or she) has made them richer today than yesterday.

It has taken a long time for me to remember that I had done a good job, that I had risen to the challenge. Even so, I recall what King Pyrrhus said, after winning a battle at great cost, Another such victory, and I am undone.