Jeffrey S. Davis and his team at Perficient Inc. were not ready for the bursting of the dot-com bubble back in 2001. Despite the warning signs, tough decisions were put off and fingers were crossed that the seemingly inevitable recession wouldn’t turn out as bad as everyone feared.
“We waited too long to really respond to it,” says Davis, who was COO at the IT consulting firm at the time. “We knew what we were going to have to do in terms of layoffs was going to be very unpleasant. So we had a lot of noise among the executives and senior managers in the company. Some people were saying, ‘That’s disaster. If we lay off anybody at all, everybody else will quit, and we won’t have a business left.’ Or people said, ‘That’s not what I’m here for. I refuse to lay anybody off.’”
Davis and his team were in denial.
“People didn’t want to believe it after things had gone so well, especially for the prior couple of years,” Davis says. “From 1999 to 2001, it had just been a phenomenal year for the tech industry. It was hard for people to accept that it was over and over really rather quickly. Denial is exactly the right word.”
Perficient took a pretty big hit like a lot of businesses, but eventually did what it had to do in order to survive and the lessons that Davis learned through that difficult time stuck with him. And those enduring lessons proved to be crucial when the economy began to plummet again in late 2007.
“It was amazing to me the kind of repeat that we had,” says Davis, currently the president and CEO at the 1,015-employee company. “We had the same type of people, salespeople, saying, ‘Oh, we just have to sell our way out of this.’ All the same things were playing over again.”
Fortunately for Perficient, which took in $215 million in 2010 revenue, Davis and his colleagues on the senior management team knew they couldn’t afford to wait around and hope for the best.
“We were able to tune that out and move the business along with what we needed to do,” Davis says.
