During my slow season this summer — while cutting an ad budget that was bleeding money — I noticed my most enthusiastic customers weren’t individuals at all: therapists were buying my mental health apparel to wear for clients, and a high school leadership program emailed asking to buy thirty-two custom hoodies because our missions aligned. Wholesale was already happening to me; I just hadn’t built it a front door. So I formalized it — a wholesale and schools page, referral kits for therapist offices, a free printable pack for school counselors — and turned inbound accidents into a channel with a 15-piece minimum. The resilience lesson: downturns don’t just cut revenue, they reveal it. When consumer spending dipped, the buyers who sought me out anyway showed me exactly where the durable business was.

When the economy tightens, clients cut discretionary marketing first. Reputation work sits close enough to marketing that we felt the compression directly. At the same time, we noticed disputes rising. People who lose money go looking for who is responsible, and litigation follows.

That contrast pointed at the opportunity. We were already doing forensic work for reputation clients: tracing the origin of defamatory content and quantifying what a damaged online presence costs a business. Attorneys kept asking whether that analysis would survive cross-examination. It would. We had been giving away the most valuable version of our own capability.

So we built litigation consulting and expert witness services into a formal practice line. I developed a methodology for quantifying reputational damages, the three-ring impressions model, with attorney William Choslovsky. A federal court accepted it in O’Leary v. Armstrong, and that judgment gave the practice a credential no amount of marketing spend could have purchased. In February 2025 we acquired Capital Expert Services, founded in 2016 by Dr. Alexandra Lajoux, which added economic damages, M&A valuation, and corporate governance work alongside our digital forensics.

The practice moves through a cycle differently from the core business. Marketing budgets compress in a downturn. Legal budgets hold, because litigation is rarely optional for the party who has already been harmed.

The resilience lesson is narrower than most people expect. Durable new revenue usually comes from capability you already own and have never priced. Look at what clients ask you for informally, repeatedly, and free of charge. That request pattern is a market telling you something, and most operators hear it for years before they act on it.

The second half of the lesson concerns credibility. We could not have entered litigation consulting on ambition alone. Courts do not accept methodology because a firm says it works. Every adjacency you enter has its own standard of proof, and you either meet it or you stay out.

Diversification looks like invention from the outside. From the inside it usually looks like finally charging for work you were already doing.

I found our new revenue stream by tracking what clients asked for right before they cancelled. In early 2023, three retainers dropped in the same six weeks. Every one of those calls ended the same way, with someone asking me what they should do on their own now.

So we built a paid audit product. One flat fee, a two week turnaround, a call at the end and no ongoing commitment.

Twenty two businesses bought it that first quarter. Nine came back on retainer within a year, which we would never have gotten from a hard sell during a bad month for their budget.

Here’s the lesson I took from it. Resilience is about how you package the work, not how much of your own spending you cut. Owners who slash costs still lose the account. Owners with a smaller entry point keep the relationship alive until money loosens up again.

The revenue stream: we built the brokerage around buyers who do not live in the country.

The context matters, because that was not a clever growth idea in a good year. New York had gone quiet locally. I was still at Deloitte then, on a two year assignment in Germany, and my partner had the idea to fly out and sit down in person with partners at big law firms across Europe. First city was Paris, 2007. In two days he sold two apartments in Manhattan. That is genuinely how it started, and it became the whole business. Still is.

How we identified it. Not through analysis.

Through noticing that the demand had not disappeared, it had moved. The buyers were still there, they were just somewhere else, and nobody was going to them. Everyone in the market was fighting over the same shrinking pool in the same city, while there were buyers in London and Singapore who wanted New York and had nobody on the ground here they trusted.

The lesson I would actually pass on: in a downturn most people cut their way to survival and wait for the market to come back. The cheaper and better move is usually to go find the demand that relocated rather than keep competing for the demand that shrank. A downturn is rarely a shortage of buyers. It is a shortage of buyers where you happen to be standing.

The second half of that is less comfortable. It only worked because we went in person, at real expense, with no guarantee, at the exact moment the business could least afford it. If we had run the numbers on that Paris trip beforehand it would not have been approved.

And the thing that made it durable was not the trip at all. It was that we then rebuilt the entire operation around serving that buyer properly. Time zones. Language. Explaining a market they cannot walk around in. A one off tactic would have died within a year. A business reorganized around who is actually buying does not.

The downturn that taught me this was the 2018 crypto winter, and the lesson was that resilience came from serving a wider slice of the same customer, not from finding a new one.

I was running 2Miners, a mining pool. Revenue is a fee on what miners earn, so when prices fall your revenue falls twice: once because the coin is worth less, and again because miners switch their machines off. The instinct was to chase whichever coin still looked profitable and market at it. That’s a race you lose, because everyone else is reading the same chart on the same day.

What actually worked was adding algorithms. Miners own hardware, and hardware can only run certain algorithms. A miner holding a card that couldn’t mine our main coin wasn’t a lost sale, they were a customer we had no product for. Supporting more algorithms turned that idle hardware into revenue without acquiring a single new person. By 2019 the pool was top five globally by hashrate across multiple algorithms, and the spread was the whole point: no single coin’s price could take the business down.

I’ll state the limit of that claim. It worked because our customers’ constraint was physical and legible. We could see what hardware people owned. Most businesses don’t get a signal that clean, and I wouldn’t tell a services company to go find its “other algorithms” and expect the analogy to survive contact with reality.

The part I did keep: in a downturn, the cheapest new revenue is usually already inside your existing audience, sitting in the slice you’ve quietly been telling to go somewhere else.

The real downturn opportunity in crypto wasn’t a new product line. It was a cost structure shift that only works when capital is scarce.

At Nika Finance, we built a non-custodial consumer application that routes perpetuals through Hyperliquid via builder codes and prediction markets through Polymarket instead of building those primitives in-house. That routing model was a direct response to the market environment. Capital was expensive. The talent pool was shallow. The bloat pattern from the previous cycle (raise, build a v1, burn the rest on token launch prep) had stopped working because the buyers for those tokens had evaporated.

So we built the opposite architecture. Three-person team. No separate function lines for product, growth, or marketing. We route to specialized infrastructure partners and build the interface, wallet, cross-chain plumbing, and AI layer in-house. The result is a five-product surface (spot, perps, staking, yield, prediction markets) shipped by three people with execution density higher than teams ten times our size.

That density became the revenue advantage. Matching-engine parity with best-in-class perpetuals from day one without building the matching engine. Market inventory and resolution for prediction markets without building an oracle stack. The internal engineering surface is narrower than the surface visible to users, so we ship in days rather than quarters. Speed is the moat.

The lesson is structural, not motivational. Downturns force you to question what you actually need to build versus what you can route. Most teams treat every surface as something they have to own. That thinking works when capital is free and hiring is easy. When it’s not, the orchestrator model wins because routing compounds faster than building.

When COVID hit, our business was significantly impacted because we primarily supported payments for live events at Fortune 500 companies. Events stopped almost overnight, and many of our clients were not sure when, or even whether, large-scale in-person events would return.

At that point, we had a choice. We could dramatically scale back and wait for the market to recover, or we could look closely at what we had built and identify where else it could create value.

We recognized that live events and productions share many of the same financial challenges. Productions are essentially longer, more complex live events. They involve many of the same suppliers, fast-moving teams, tight timelines, approvals, payments, compliance requirements, and reconciliation needs.

That insight led us to pivot into film and television production and expand further into music and entertainment. Rather than abandoning our core expertise, we applied it to adjacent creative industries with similar operational problems.

That decision created an entirely new revenue stream at a time when our original market had nearly disappeared. Now that live events have returned stronger than ever, we serve a much broader creative economy across events, music, entertainment, and production.

The biggest lesson I learned about business resilience is that a downturn does not always require a completely new idea. Sometimes the best opportunity is already inside your business. You have to step back, understand the underlying problem you solve, and identify other markets experiencing that same problem.

Resilience comes from being willing to adapt without losing sight of your core strengths. Our pivot worked because we did not try to become a different company. We found a larger market for what we already did well.

When budgets tighten, small businesses don’t stop needing marketing. They stop being able to afford it the way it is usually sold. That gap was our opening. At Plondo we broke our services into fixed price, a la carte packages instead of one big monthly retainer nobody wants to sign in a soft market. A business could buy a single website, or switch on one piece of automation at a time, and scale up only once it saw results. Pricing the entry point low and making it clear turned hesitant prospects into a steady, repeatable revenue stream.

The lesson on resilience: a downturn is usually a packaging problem more than a demand problem. The need rarely disappears, the willingness to commit does. If you shrink the commitment, prove value quickly, and make the next step obvious, you end up with revenue that holds better than the big contracts did, because it is spread across many customers instead of resting on a few.

During an economic downturn, we recognized that many prospective homebuyers were postponing purchases because they were uncertain about interest rates and affordability. Rather than waiting for the market to rebound, we introduced paid homebuyer education workshops and personalized mortgage planning consultations. These services generated an additional revenue stream while helping clients prepare financially, even if they weren’t ready to purchase immediately.

The strategy also strengthened our pipeline. Many attendees returned months later when they were ready to buy or refinance because they already trusted our guidance. Instead of focusing solely on immediate transactions, we invested in long-term relationships, which proved far more valuable during a slower market.

The biggest lesson I learned about business resilience is that adaptability is more important than trying to predict market conditions. Businesses that continue solving customers’ evolving problems, even if that means offering new services or changing their delivery model, are much better positioned to weather economic uncertainty and emerge stronger when the market recovers.

I came up with a more affordable way for companies to hire robotics talent after noticing that the demand for skilled workers was growing, while hiring budgets were getting smaller.

During the economic downturn, many robotics and physical AI companies halted their aggressive hiring plans. However, many companies had urgent needs to address broken systems and new initiatives, but they could not recruit full-time staff through the expensive recruiting packages.

I thought, what need do they have now that would cost less to provide?

To that end, I created a less extensive service that connected organizations with freelance robotics experts for short-term gigs, rather than full-time staff.

This service helped keep our cash flow steady during the downturn. It also brought in many new customers, and as some of them became long-term clients, their hiring needs went back to what they were before.

The main lesson learned is that if you address the needs of your customers with less complicated solutions, they will appreciate the service, even if your business is operating on a smaller budget.

When Covid hit, I was running a tour company in Scotland, working as the main guide alongside a small team of trusted freelancers. Practically overnight, revenue went to zero because tourism stopped. Government support gave us some oxygen, but I still had no idea what I was going to do next.

My former partner encouraged me to consider studying again. I had already become interested in how software could solve many of the problems I had experienced running tours, but I never imagined I would be the person building those tools.

I jumped into studying software engineering and statistics, started developing Viamki in early 2023, and launched the first (and, to be honest, quite ugly) version later that year. What began as an experiment became a complete pivot: I went from guiding tours to building SaaS for tour and activity operators, and Viamki is now my only focus.

The biggest lesson I learned is that I probably should have made a change earlier, but I was afraid that changing direction would mean I had failed. I enjoyed running tours, but I had also started to feel trapped by the business I had built. Covid forced me to stop, and that made the pivot feel organic.

In a time of economic crisis, it became clear that the most promising opportunities could be found by listening to our customers and solving the challenges they face.

The initial idea behind the Big Drop was web design. However, it soon became clear that our clients needed more than just website development; they needed additional support such as marketing the website to ensure high visibility and increased traffic. That’s why we decided to provide more services like SEO, Branding, AI Automation, AI SEO and Local SEO.

This was not a matter of trying to follow election trends. This was the result of the understanding that corporations needed a partner that was able to provide more digital services than many other vendors. In difficult financial circumstances, a corporation is becoming more concerned about the expenses and effectiveness of its operations.

Problems also arose with expansion. With growth came the need to find the right employees, maintain the quality of our work, and ensure that we were not setting our clients up for false hopes. Growth brings new responsibilities as well as new opportunities.

The most important thing I learned about resilience is that organizations need to continue to evolve and remain pragmatic. What worked yesterday does not mean that it will work tomorrow. Those organizations that thrive during change are those that learn, adapt, and remain connected with their clients.

My recommendation for entrepreneurs is straightforward – listen carefully to the challenges of your customers. It is where the next big opportunity lies but before anything else, ensure that your organization can deliver it successfully.

So, with the advent of AI, we noticed that the biggest, the most important thing right now is to help businesses that are providing amazing service grow. And that comes in the form of providing them their ideal client in the form of a lead or a call or a model that’s gonna help get the message to the right person for them.

So instead of trying to focus in every direction, especially doing a lot of the work that before we had been doing in-house, we focus on marketing, message delivery, and then making sure that the person who needs the help is able to connect with and get the help that they need.

So we started with basically testing in one vertical in debt, then we expanded to tax, now we have also bankruptcy. And what we focus on is learning what people want, what they respond to, and then adjusting and fine-tuning from there.

And the result is that more and more people are partnering with us, and we’re growing, and we’re able to continuously make a greater and greater positive impact in people who really need it, allowing them to get connected with the companies that can help them well.

I think the best way to identify and capitalize on new revenue streams during economic downturns is understanding what people are searching for and virality.

I run several websites that are all catered to specific audiences, one of which is in the health and fitness space. I noticed there was a gap in the market for a very viral product with an honest review related to that. Creating that review and providing the audience with something that was missing in the market generated a significant amount of traffic and a new income stream of over $1,000 per month for one of my websites.

There’s always an opportunity and always a way to find new revenue streams when you’re running an online business. New products hit the market every day.

We identified the new revenue stream by watching who was paying in cash during a recession. Reputation cleanup.

In 2020, when most of our media business stalled because brands froze marketing budgets, we noticed a different pattern in our ORM work. Founders with reputation problems were still writing checks. A negative article ranking in position one for their name wasn’t a “nice to have” fix. It was an emergency. Those clients paid faster, paid more, and didn’t negotiate.

So we stopped treating reputation as a side service and made it the entry point. We restructured our pitch entirely around search result repair, review management, and negative content suppression. Once a client came in for that, we already had their trust and the full delivery infrastructure in-house. PR, content, brand visibility, everything. They usually handed over the rest within 60 days because we were already inside their operation fixing the thing that mattered most.

That shift created a compounding revenue model. A client who starts at $3,000 a month for reputation work ends up at $12,000 a month when they realize we can handle their entire marketing stack without adding more vendors. The upsell isn’t a pitch. It’s just offering what we already built.

The one lesson I learned about resilience is that downturns don’t kill all spending. They kill discretionary spending. The businesses that survive are the ones that solve problems people will pay to fix even when budgets are tight. Reputation damage is one of those problems. We just had to stop positioning ourselves as a general marketing agency and start with the pain point that had urgency.

That single change turned 2020 into our best revenue year. Not because the market improved. Because we finally matched what we were selling to what people would actually pay for when money was tight.

During COVID, an organization I worked with used internal communications to lead to the most profitable year in company history. The company provided luxury services and it was unclear whether the company would even survive the economic downturn.

We used an All Hands meeting to discuss the unknowns of what COVID would mean for the business, the hope to avoid restructuring and layoffs, and an initial brainstorm of ideas (nothing was too big or small). The conversation continued in public Slack channels and ultimately frivolous things were cut (like a company who watered the plants in the office) and new service offerings were created that provided value to customers.

The honest communication with the team created a space for everyone to start thinking creatively and come together to create ideas and solutions that contributed to growth.