It's all in your head: feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the economy? Uncertain times like these can really mess with your mind. Here's what other entrepreneurs are doing to keep it together—and keep moving ahead

Entrepreneur, Jan, 2005 by Chris Penttila

The U.S. economy is back to where it was in the early 1990s when the worst of the recession was over, but we're lacking the innovation and optimism of that time period, says Maria Minniti, associate professor of Economics at Babson College in Babson Park, Massachusetts. She sees 2005 as a crucial year for decisions that will have long-term impact on the economy. Uncertainty "is not a positive thing," she says. "There's a fork in the road."

How good entrepreneurs feel depends on where they're based, says Brenda Nashawaty, 50, principal of CHEN PR Inc., a 20-employee technology PR firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, whose clients include Sun Microsystems and Fairchild Semiconductor. "I think the sense of recovery is about six months ahead on the West Coast," she says. "We've just started to feel things are turning around in the past couple of months."

Nashawaty and three PR colleagues started CHEN PR (an acronym created from the first letters of their last names) in 1996 and rode New England's dotcom wave. When the high-tech sector started to crumble in 2000, though, they stopped replacing employees who left the company, and growth stayed flat until 2003. Nashawaty thinks the downturn of the early 2000s was much worse than the slump of the early 1990s. This time, "it was bigger," she says. "There were more people in the business who lost their jobs, [and] in all businesses, not just ours."

Nashawaty is cautiously optimistic about the future. On one hand, CHEN PR is branching into PR services for biotech and security firms, and it's seen a healthy uptick in company sales, which surpass $1 million per year. On the other hand, she sees businesspeople becoming too cautious. She thinks it will take another year before the economy is healthy. Until then, she believes, it's important to look on the bright side and forge ahead conservatively. "It's corny, but we Americans plow through. We get through bad times," she says. "Everyone [in business] feels like it's going to get better if we just stick to what we're doing."

THE SURREAL LIFE

Some entrepreneurs are glad the overheated dotcom era is a distant memory. 'A lot of people who didn't know what they were doing jumped in because they [thought they] could wing it, and [they] ticked off a lot of consumers," says Scott Siegel, co-founder and CEO of 6-year-old Sunrise Financial Inc., a mortgage broker in Chicago with 29 employees.

Sunrise's sales doubled every year during the first four years as the company rode the refinancing boom. Now the re-fi era has ended, and interest rates are rising; but Siegel, 38, remains optimistic. An industry shakeout is underway, leaving the company with fewer competitors. While housing prices could fall, Siegel believes the housing market will stay fundamentally strong this year. He stays focused on the day-to-day business instead of small movements in interest rates or political infighting in Washington. "I don't think it matters politically what's going on," Siegel says. "With their homes, people are functioning at more of a local level. It's very myopic." The company plans to double in size over the next few years through strategic alliances with other lenders. Sales hit $1.8 million in 2004, and Siegel hopes to hire at least five new employees in 2005.