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28 October 2011
It’s amazing what the last 4 years were like! At the end of 2007, I was sure that we would have massive layoffs coming at CSR…if not in 2008 certainly in 2009. I spend sleepless nights thinking about our 30 year old company and its future and felt responsible for each and every employee. Many of our staff have grown up in this company married and had children in the years they were employed with us. How were we going to tell them that their jobs were in jeopardy and that we could not predict how long the company may survive?
Well, after candid conversations with our staff, strong leadership skills and prudent decisions, we managed to avoid the large layoffs. We did go into the shortened schedule whereby all of our employees kept their job. We took Friday’s off similar to what many firms and business had done thru 2010, we cut principals salaries, but managed to maintain all of the health insurances and also our retirement plans funded. At least the future could be funded thru the 401K plan by dollar cost averaging thru the ups and down of these crazy times.
We are slowly are getting ourselves back on our feet and I have to say that 2011 was a challenging year for our company. It was also a year where we developed new relationships, reignited past relationships and saw some new activity giving us a glimmer of hope for 2012 and beyond. Many of our diversified services became more useable and we were providing services that in the past were only a small percentage of our workload.
I have to give credit to our employees and their families as well as our clients for going along with the program and developing a new understanding of leadership, management and certainly the concept of “tightening the belt”.
