group. yannic silver is the founder of internet lifestyle.com and steven corn sl the owner of brownies hardway store in san francisco who we profiled here on your business back in 2006. nice to see you again. nice to see you, too. back then we were talking about health care and how you provided health care benefits for your employees. what s your outlook right now? are things really hard for you? i don t think they re hard, but they certainly are flat. you have to look a lot more to where i can make some more money. and are you finding new places or is that tricky as well? not so much finding new places but relooking at the places that we ve always done and sort of mining those a little bit more. gene, so in your article, you basically said times like these make you focus on what s important. yeah, they do. nowadays, you talk about the economic strengths that are here. i mention in my new york times column it was actually a blog written by somebody else who
brought up a really good point saying that when cash is tight, we re all, as business owner, really thinking harder about where we re going to spend our money. there is a theory that says whether cash is tight or not tight, no matter how well you re doing, you should always be thinking like you re lean and mean as to where you re spending your money. some people believe even though this is tough times, it is challenging the best of us to make sure we re managing our money the best way. it resonated with me because i worked for a start-up in 1998 where people had venture capital. and people wasted it. but even beyond that which is just sort of silly, just on marketing. let me get a big splashy tv campaign and they didn t care whether it would work or not. now they re being a lot smarter. yannic, you work with small business owners. what do they think? almost like the best of times and the worst of times because we have people doing really well in different thing, then you have peopl