Birth of a Business

Lailah Harrigan saw it coming.

She had worked as an executive assistant and a sales assistant at Deutsche Bank for 10 years. The 40-year-old had always worked for big companies, for Lehman Brothers and Sumitomo before taking the latest job. She loved the job at Deutsche Bank, loved the people and the culture and the manager. But in the fall and winter, there was carnage on Wall Street, and she knew her job could be the next to go. In December, it happened. She lost the job she loved.

But she had a fallback—silver. She took the opportunity to turn what had been a part-time affair into a full-time business, Passion For Silver. For years, she’d sold silver trinkets she imported from all over the world at art fairs around New York on weekends.

She turned that into her full-time work. Like thousands of others around the country during the winter of 2009 and the depth of the recession, she turned from the corporate world that had laid her off and made herself into an entrepreneur.

By Wednesday Harrigan was way back at the back of the cavernous Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, at the New York Xpo for business, past the glitzy displays for Time-Warner and the Geek Squad’s Volkwagen Beetle, at a display booth covered in silver, powered by passion, and her will to start over after misfortune.

Like many others in this recession, when Harrigan lost her job, she worked through the pain and emerged as a full-time entrepreneur, with a website she’s using to promote her wares, which cost from $5 to $150.

“I took some time to reassess,” she said. “Then I started focusing on the business and I started working on the website.”

And she hit the trail to events like Wednesday’s. And she got herself a booth at St. Bart’s outdoor plaza, steps away from the Waldorf Astoria, at Park Avenue and 50th Street for the Christmas season.

“I’m getting a lot of attention,” she said.

And she invested.

“I have my savings, and severance, I invested in my business,” she said. She wouldn’t say exactly how much she had invested, but said it was way north of $20,000. She’s also invested something else. “You have to have the faith,” she said, “You have to have the passion.”

At the same time Harrigan was picking herself up and getting on with business, in the depth of the recession this winter, so were others across the country.

“I’m seeing a much larger portion of people who are kind of being unexpectedly thrust into this,” Jeff Cornwall, the Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University, told the Nashville Business Journal. “Interestingly, what we have found in recessions is that many of these folks that had never intended to be entrepreneurs get the bug and get that lifestyle, and never want to go back even when the economy picks up.”

In the Denver area in February, at the depth of the recession, the local Small Business Administration office was getting double the number of calls as it had in summer 2008, from individuals wanting to start businesses.

“Before, we might have gotten 25 calls a day; we’re now at 50 or 60 a day,” SBA spokesman Christopher Chavez told the Denver Business Journal at the time. “Our workshops through SCORE, their numbers are up 100 percent. In August or September (2008), they maybe had 15 people; now they’ve got 30 or 40 people in a workshop.”

Now, for Harrigan, it still hurts that she lost her job. But she’s looking forward. And like many other small business owners, she’s looking for better times ahead.

Fifty-two percent of small business owners surveyed by the City Business Journals Network, the advertising affiliate of Portfolio.com parent American City Business Journals, recently were optimistic about their business prospects in the next 12 months.

Count Harrigan among them.

“2010 is a good year,” she said.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com