Hi Mountain Ash,

My business was a public relations and marketing firm that specialized in creating web sites for small to medium -sized businesses. I became a fairly large "small PR" firm - we had a staff of 14 and operated out of a 6,000 square foot building, which we had been planning to buy when our lease was up - in October.

Business had grown due to our being an "AT&T Creative Alliance Partner," which meant that AT&T long lines sales reps recommended us to their clients to whom they wanted to sell internet hosting. We designed the web sites for these companies. And, because we were quite good at it, we normally were able to develop these design projects into long term relationships.

In other words, we were the outsourced web designers for about 50 companies, not only building sites but handling all the ongoing site maintenance for them.

(These days site maintenance is a lot easier, and most companies do it themselves. But back then, this was a very big "niche" business for us.)

We had cultivated our AT&T clients in 35 states and when 9/11 happened, life was very good: In fact, it was so good, a very large web design company was negotiating to buy us out, and we had $400,000 in signed contracts in hand for new work to be done in the next 6 months.

Within a month of 9/11 the buyout offer had been rescinded and all of those signed contracts had been canceled. The cancellations were through no fault of our own -- the cancellations happened because the businesses who had contracted with us became frightened by the events of 9/11 and opted to "hold off," "wait and see," etc.

Meanwhile we had staff to pay, bills to pay -- and only a small trickle of income coming in. We also had clients who expected us to continue to serve them.

It was a very scary time. And of course, no banks wanted to loan us money to cover our expenses.

Our accountant told us we really had only two choices:
(1) Close our doors and leave all our clients "in the lurch," work in process incomplete, etc.

OR he said,

(2) We could offer every employee whatever office furniture they needed - desk, chair, internet connection, computer -- and send them home to work.

Essentially, our accountant thought we could stay in business if we became a VIRTUAL company.

We chose the latter and we managed to stay afloat.

A few years later Steve and I were at the annual Public Relations Society of America's annual Counselor's Academy meeting. This is a meeting of owners of PR firms. We were invited there to speak on "going virtual." and another speaker surprised us at the opening of the convention when he calmly stated that "We know none of you here are from businesses which serve as outsourced IT or web design resources. Post 9/11, none of those businesses exist any more."

And apparently he was right - most of these sorts of businesses closed, nationwide. I was looking at a ZDNet blog yesterday, where a whole bunch of IT consultants who used to consult with small and large businesses, as we did, were sharing their 9/11 stories. There was a lot of reader response to this blog post -- and every one of the stories told of how their consulting businesses had closed post 9/11. (Here's a link to that story.

We stayed in business, but these days all but one of our staff are contract labor. We are still virtual. (And I love working from home.)

So how did 9/11 affect you?
I'm sure it did, in some way.

Remember, right after 9/11 there was a new sense of unity in the country. People were working together and trying to help each other.

Ten years later, we seem to have lost that. The bickering between political parties, for example, serves no purpose except to divide us and keep progress from being made...

I would sure love to regain that "all for one and one for all" mentality we developed right after 9/11.