What Will It Take to Survive?

From one CEO I spoke with, “We are all resisting the impulse to pull our horns in and hunker down for a long, cold winter. What we need to do is continue to work as closely with our customers as we can and invest in projects that benefit those customers and improve our bottom line.”

Consensus among those I interviewed for this article is that the acute part of this downturn will last 12 to 24 months. For most large converters, major projects and customer initiatives take 12 to 36 months to develop. While many of these projects have been scaled back and some even mothballed, most are still moving forward, betting that the economy will have recovered by the time the project is completed.