{"id":35,"date":"2010-03-22T10:44:02","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T15:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/?p=35"},"modified":"2010-12-20T11:47:27","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T16:47:27","slug":"start-ups-survive-recession-unscathed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Taking a risk on himself"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recession was no match for Ryan Anderson. He quit his job at an Ottawa-based marketing agency in the summer of 2008 \u2014 just before the global financial crisis hit Canada \u2014 to start his own one-man public relations firm.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ryan Anderson owns Fat Canary Communications, an Ottawa public relations firm that specializes in social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were people getting laid off all around me,\u201d he says of the period before he left his job. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a good place to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were two employees left in Anderson\u2019s communications department at Fuel Industries and the company was about to lay off one more. Anderson says he probably wouldn\u2019t have been let go because he had seniority, but he decided it was time to do his own thing.<\/a><\/p>\n

The hardest part, Anderson says, was leaving behind the job security, but his hesitation didn\u2019t last long.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf all I\u2019m staying for is security but you have no real job security in this economy, then why not go out on my own?\u201d he remembers rationalizing.<\/p>\n

A year and a half later, Fat Canary Communications \u2014 Anderson\u2019s social media public relations firm \u2014 has made it out of the recession unscathed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not going to discuss my personal finances too much,\u201d Anderson says, \u201cBut after a year of being on my own I bought a house.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in a better financial situation than I was when I was on salary.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, he says he\u2019s even had to turn down potential clients in the past year because his firm has been so busy.<\/p>\n

Smaller can be smarter<\/span><\/p>\n

Anderson credits his success to Fat Canary\u2019s size. He now has one full-time staffer and a handful of contractors, but no office \u2014 he works from home or wherever he parks his laptop.<\/p>\n

Anderson also says his business benefited from companies that were searching for social media<\/a> strategies to bring in new clients during the recession.<\/p>\n

However, Anderson says the drawback was that if his business failed, he would have been completely alone. The 29-year-old says he tried to start his own business right after graduating from university, but it didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to have a certain level of seniority before you can really make a go of it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

It helped that he took some clients with him from his old job this time.<\/p>\n

“You have to have a certain level of seniority before you can really make a go of it.”<\/p>\n

Anderson\u2019s not the only Ottawan to break out of a larger firm and survive the recession.<\/p>\n

Danielle C\u00f4t\u00e9, president of the Canadian Public Relations Society\u2019s Ottawa-Gatineau chapter, says many public relations and communications people have been going small in recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnecdotally, there\u2019s definitely been a change,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

C\u00f4t\u00e9 says there\u2019s a large group of independent public relations consultants who\u2019ve been doing well steadily over the last couple of years. But the bigger firms haven\u2019t had as much luck \u2014 especially in the past year.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom what I hear. . .agencies are downsizing and some are closing,\u201d C\u00f4t\u00e9 says.<\/p>\n

She says she thinks the key to success during a recession \u2014 when many organizations were cutting their communications budgets \u2014 is to diversify.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re just depending on government and [the] government\u2019s not spending, good luck to you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if you diversify to tech(nology) and government and healthcare and maybe the retail sector\u2026 all of those industries may be affected but you\u2019re not going to get a big hit at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding untapped niche markets<\/span><\/p>\n

Even so, others have found success in niche markets.<\/p>\n

Ian Capstick runs MediaStyle, an Ottawa-based communications firm that caters exclusively to left-of-centre clients.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ian Capstick is a former hill staffer who launched a public relations firm in the middle of the recession.<\/p>\n

Capstick\u2019s firm only works with unions, non-governmental organizations, associations and, on occasion, social enterprises that give back to the community.<\/p>\n

Capstick said the niche market has been a big success for him because there was no one catering exclusively to that kind if market before he came along.<\/p>\n

Before he launched MediaStyle at the height of the recession in January 2009, Capstick worked on the Hill as a press officer, first for the Liberal Party and then the NDP.<\/p>\n

MediaStyle had no clients for its first three weeks. Now at the end of his first year, Capstick says his company came out with a happy, healthy profit \u2014 despite the recession.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made out better than I did on Parliament Hill for all those years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

MediaStyle is a one-man shop \u2014 Capstick still has no staff. He hires freelancers, as needed, to work on projects with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have a giant headquarters with a fountain in the lobby, but I also don\u2019t have to charge you for the overhead of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Fat Canary, MediaStyle doesn\u2019t have a traditional headquarters. Anderson uses The Code Factory \u2014 a shared office space on Queen Street in downtown Ottawa \u2014 and works from home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have a giant headquarters with a fountain in the lobby,\u201d he says. \u201cBut subsequently, I also don\u2019t have to charge you for the overhead of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the future, Capstick says, he may want his company to grow into a medium-sized firm with a small staff, but that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really want to be a big guy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a market. I like my market.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people clung to their jobs during the recession. Others chose to quit, braving an uncertain financial future to launch their own start-ups. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}