PRESIDENT’S LETTER Martin Howard The economy is showing strong signs of continued growth, business is moving at a fast pace, the backlog for next year is filling up and it’s fun to come to work every day. We all know that the economy is cyclical and it’s only a matter of time before the next downturn. But, for now it feels like the business environment is back to normal, and relationships and quality are once again more meaningful than low price. We are stretching and growing our teams to maximum capacity as we grow volume in manageable increments. I truly hope this is describing your experience as we start the 4th quar- ter of 2018. For those of us who were in business back in the early 2000s this is a familiar feeling. So, you’re asking, what’s up with the title, “Passing the test of prosperity”? This all sounds like a bed of roses. Let me explain. I’m sure you feel as I do, but I hope we never see another economic period like the one from 2007 to 2012. Although business was better in 2012, the market was still very choppy and uncertain until 2016. That’s almost a nine year period of very tough times to be running a business. I’m confident that we all learned many lessons during those very dif- ficult years, suffering the adversity of hardship. We cut fat out of our companies until we couldn’t cut anymore. We got smaller and then we downsized; we squeezed and did everything we could to survive. We learned ways to work smarter; we established procedures that max- imized efficiency. We found ways to reduce and manage risks and improved our skills at negotiating contracts. We figured out what our strengths are and how to improve on them, and decided to move away from our weak areas and stop losing money on them. It became clear who our best customers are and what they need and expect from us. Did you have a similar path through the recession? Congratulations! You have passed the test of adversity and come out on the other side. All these lessons learned can be called “Best Practices.” This series of letters I’ve written for TileLetter were things I learned during mul- tiple times of adversity, including this last one. That’s the disappoint- ing part: some of these lessons I Passing the test of prosperity 16 TileLetter | October 2018