I've Already Lived Through My Version of an Economic Apocalypse

I have never talked about any of this publicly. Not to clients, not on social media, not in any forum. Writing it down feels uncomfortably vulnerable. But if my writing is going to mean anything, it has to be open. So here it is.

It was March 2008.

By then, I had already lost almost everything.

The business chapter I had invested years of my life in was over. I walked away from a business, and a business partnership, that had cost me almost everything. My personal savings were gone. My sense of security was gone. The financial safety net I thought I had was gone.

What remained was a much smaller company, a product I believed in, and a determination to keep going.

When people tell the story of surviving the Global Financial Crisis, they usually begin with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

My story starts six months earlier.

Because when the financial system began to unravel in September 2008, I wasn't entering the storm from solid ground. I was already trying to rebuild after being knocked flat.

And then the lines of credit disappeared.

Not just mine — everyone's. Over 75% of lenders tightened lending standards for small businesses almost overnight. Lines of credit were drastically reduced and in many cases revoked altogether. Bank lending to small businesses, which had peaked at $659 billion in 2008, plummeted by nearly 18% over the following three years.

For most small business owners that was a crisis. For me, it was a crisis landing on top of a crisis.

So I did what you do when there is genuinely no other option.

I rented out my home and couch-surfed while I rebuilt the business entirely on its own cash flow.

Not on projections. Not on credit. On what the business actually generated, week by week, month by month. If the cash wasn't there, the expense didn't happen. If the inventory run couldn't be funded from revenue, it waited. Every single decision ran through one filter: can we actually pay for this right now?

It was the most financially and personally brutal period of my life. And it taught me more about running a product business than any course, any book, or any consultant ever could have.

What kept the business alive

It wasn't brilliance. It wasn't a pivot or a rebrand or a viral moment.

It was one thing: the product had real, repeat customers who kept buying it. And I learned to run the entire business on what those customers generated.

Nothing more, nothing less.

That forced discipline created something I didn't have a name for at the time. I was essentially doing cash flow management by necessity rather than by design. Every dollar had a job. Every expense was questioned. Every inventory decision was made with one eye on what was coming in before committing to what was going out.

Years later, when I discovered the Profit First methodology, I recognised immediately what it was describing — because I had lived a rougher, harder version of it already. The framework gave language and structure to something I had learned to do under fire.

The second test: a global pandemic experienced from the bottom of the earth

Fast forward to March 2020.

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Borders closed. Economies locked down. Small businesses found themselves especially vulnerable, with limited access to capital markets and revenue that, for many, evaporated overnight.

I was in New Zealand. Borders closed around me. And I was running a global product business — manufacturing in South Korea, selling primarily into the United States — from the bottom of the earth, with no ability to travel, no ability to meet suppliers or partners in person, and no certainty about how long any of it would last.

But here is the thing: I was not starting from the bottom this time.

By 2020 I had spent years running the business on Profit First principles. I had cash reserves. I had a clear picture of my runway. I knew what my Cash Conversion Cycle looked like. I had a system that told me exactly what I could and couldn't afford at any given moment. I had built the architecture and system to understand what my bank balances and my financials actually meant.

The pandemic was hard. Running a global business while stranded at the bottom of the earth during a global crisis is not something I would recommend. I couldn't access US government support because I was in New Zealand. I couldn't access New Zealand support because my business was US-based. I fell through every gap. But I did not come close to losing the business. Not once.

Same founder. Same product. Two completely different outcomes — twelve years apart.

The difference was not luck. It was not the economy being kinder the second time around. It was the cash flow system I had built in the years between.

Why I'm telling you this now

Last week I wrote about why physical product founders may be better positioned than most people think as AI reshapes the economy. I meant every word of it.

But I also know that positioning means nothing without the financial foundation underneath it. Being in the right category of business doesn't save you. Having real customers doesn't save you. Even having a great product doesn't save you.

What saves you is knowing your numbers well enough to make good decisions before the crisis forces bad ones.

I learned that the hard way — twice, in two different decades, under two different kinds of economic pressure.

I still have no line of credit. Because now, I don't need one.

You don't have to learn it the way I did.

Next week: the cash flow mechanics that actually determine resilience — and what you should be building right now, before you need it.