From Chaos to Leadership

Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com, discusses how the September 11 attacks and the economic downturn affected her business and tested her abilities as a company leader .

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Reprinted courtesy of EntreWorld.org

Last August, I was struggling to stay optimistic about the prospects for my small media community web site, www.mediabistro.com. Job Listing Classified advertisements -- our main source of revenues -- were in a slow, perilous decline, having slid from a high of 300 listings per month to as low as 130. The media economy was in a downward spiral and companies such as Primedia and Ziff-Davis were calculated on slashing their head counts, not adding to them.

My anti-recession strategy was to diversify -- and quickly. I had just written my investors asking them for more money to build a freelance marketplace on the Web site, figuring that employers who couldn't afford high-cost full-time staff would pay to search through a database of freelancers-for-hire. My investor meeting was set for Thursday, September 13th. I had to convince them that the investment was worth it.

With money on my mind as I rushed to the gym the morning of September 11, I barely noticed the people gathering on the street outside my building. I did notice that all the channels on the muted monitors above my recumbent bicycle were playing footage from what looked like a weird new action flick about the World Trade center. "What is this?" I asked no one in particular. Then, I realized with a dull ache in my stomach that it was CNN and it was live news coverage. I rushed back to my apartment to witness Tower 2 crumbling in the background behind a surreally composed newscaster. (Why wasn't he more surprised? How could he continue his rambling, meaningless monologue?) I wanted to scream or cry or just DO something, anything. But what was there to do? Pacing my apartment, eyes riveted to the television set, I waited for something to happen that would help me make sense of this. When Tower 1 was hit, it became clear what that something was, that this was no accident, and that we were under attack. Even the newscaster had figured this one out.

Acting Instinctively

By now, most of my seven employees were beginning to call my cell phone. While watching CNN, I had momentarily forgotten I had a staff, a business, investors and an investor meeting in a couple of days. The staffers were in various stages of transit as well as in various stages of panic. Calling from her cell phone was Darby, our marketing manager, who had been underground on a darkened subway car for the last hour and a half. Vivette, our collections manager, was in tears and distraught over having seen people falling from one of the buildings as she was making her way down Sixth Avenue. Unflappable Kenny, our events manager, was sitting flummoxed at his desk trying to decide what to do about two cocktail parties scheduled for that very evening, one in downtown Manhattan. They were all looking to me for guidance. Yet, I was numb.

Amazingly, email was working. And, both terse and tentative missives had begun trickling in from worried colleagues and more worried family members. "Are you okay? I'm calling but no one's picking up!!" "The phones don't seem to be working. Please answer this email if you're there." Obviously, we would not be working on September 11th. I told everyone to go home and check in with me the next day. We then wrote the members of our New York community, expressing our sorrow over the day's events and cancelling our downtown party. Our email to San Francisco suggested that guests might want to meet that night anyway, to share each other's company and commiserate. So much for my instincts. Four of the eighty people who had RSVP'd showed up.

The day after September 11th was still far from normal. The physical condition of our work site wasn't at issue. Our offices were on 17th Street and Sixth Avenue, so most of our systems (email, telephone) were functional, if spotty. But none of the staff were feeling very functional at all. No one could concentrate. People had their computers and their radios tuned to news channels. How long would this murky political situation go on, I wondered? Were we in for another, far worse attack? Should we hide out at home until we were sure? Would the same fate befall us as had the workers in Tower 1, those doomed but stoic ones who went back to their offices, heedless of the second airplane barreling their way? All I wanted was reliable information, and there was little to be had. No one knew anything. No one could advise me. They couldn't advise themselves.

Taking Control

My instincts were off about my investors, too. While none of my media friends had known people in the World Trade Center, my investors had colleagues in the tower who perished. I assumed they'd want to cancel our Thursday meeting and, I feared, any further meetings, given the unstable business climate. But when I reached Bill, our lead investor, I had to choke back my tears. The sheer normalcy of that conversation was a tonic to the gloom that was beginning to take hold of me. He was firm and calm, determined to soldier through this. Yes, of course the meeting is on. That bomb scare in our building? It was nothing. We'll be here. Yes, take a cab if the subways aren't working. I was so thankful for this hard-assed and single-minded attitude.

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