Entrepreneurs form their worldviews not from surveys, but from
what they see happening around them. For Nate McKelvey, it's
been a wild ride since he started Quincy, Massachusetts-based
online luxury jet charter company CharterAuction.com in 1999. McKelvey, 35, hit the tail
end of the VC boom and bootstrapped the company for most of 2000.
At the same time, a now-defunct competitor received $35 million in
venture backing. "I was thinking I had a horrible idea at the
absolute wrong time," he says.
But 9/11 spurred a flurry of bookings that helped
CharterAuction.com close 2001 with sales of $1.2 million. Today,
the 25-employee company books luxury jets for highfliers ranging
from Wall Street executives and celebrities to political bigwigs
including Bill Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani.
McKelvey describes CharterAuction.com as a survivor that's
made every penny count. He's encouraged by the company's
international business, which has increased from 8 to 15 percent of
the company's total business over the past two years.
CharterAuction.com projects sales of more than $15 million in 2004
and hopes to maintain 60 percent annual growth in 2005. Even VCs
are leaving voice mails, a sign things have come full circle.
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Life isn't worry free, however: Rising oil prices and wide
fluctuations in the stock market have required CharterAuction.com
to adjust its marketing strategy to promote aircraft availability
over price. "From my perspective, [the glass] is more than
three-quarters full," McKelvey says. "For people who
stuck it out, the nuclear winter is over."
Still, entrepreneurs can feel weighed down by all the
instability at home and abroad. Melissa Wayne is co-founder of
3 Oh! 5 Creative
Inc., a 9-year-old post-production company in North Hollywood,
California, that produces movie trailers, TV spots, broadcast
marketing pieces and bonus features for DVDs. Business boomed after
9/11 as people sought escape through movie rentals, but Wayne, 53,
can't escape reality. She is troubled by issues ranging from
the war in Iraq and the soaring national debt to the way other
countries view the United States.
"There are so many changes going on. It's going to be a
rocky road for quite a while," she says. "My reaction
after 9/11 was that the world as we know it is over." Running
a small company that can adapt quickly to market changes gives
Wayne some confidence about the new millennium, but she's
staving off major capital improvements and won't expand her
staff of 40 until things seem more stable.
The U.S. economy is back to where it was in the early 1990s when
the worst of the recession was over, but we're lacking the
innovation and optimism of that time period, says Maria Minniti,
associate professor of Economics at Babson College in Babson Park,
Massachusetts. She sees 2005 as a crucial year for decisions that
will have long-term impact on the economy. Uncertainty "is not
a positive thing," she says. "There's a fork in the
road."
How good entrepreneurs feel depends on where they're based,
says Brenda Nashawaty, 50, principal of CHEN PR Inc., a
20-employee technology PR firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, whose
clients include Sun Microsystems and Fairchild Semiconductor.
"I think the sense of recovery is about six months ahead on
the West Coast," she says. "We've just started to
feel things are turning around in the past couple of
months."
Nashawaty and three PR colleagues started CHEN PR (an acronym
created from the first letters of their last names) in 1996 and
rode New England's dotcom wave. When the high-tech sector
started to crumble in 2000, though, they stopped replacing
employees who left the company, and growth stayed flat until 2003.
Nashawaty thinks the downturn of the early 2000s was much worse
than the slump of the early 1990s. This time, "it was
bigger," she says. "There were more people in the
business who lost their jobs, [and] in all businesses, not just
ours."
Nashawaty is cautiously optimistic about the future. On one
hand, CHEN PR is branching into PR services for biotech and
security firms, and it's seen a healthy uptick in company
sales, which surpass $1 million per year. On the other hand, she
sees businesspeople becoming too cautious. She thinks it will take
another year before the economy is healthy. Until then, she
believes, it's important to look on the bright side and forge
ahead conservatively. "It's corny, but we Americans plow
through. We get through bad times," she says. "Everyone
[in business] feels like it's going to get better if we just
stick to what we're doing."
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