The end of a business cycle?

The end of a business cycle...and the beginning of another?

I get the sense that we are at the beginning of the end of the decline, or maybe midway. Possibly even a little further along.

It's around now in every business cycle that you start to see even more change, more turnover, than usual. Not sure why that happens -- you'd think anyone who stuck around this long would wait just a little longer. Then again, they could simply be out of resources, or even more likely, motivation.

What you often see at this point is that, yes, a recovery might be starting to happen, but it's going to be a long slow slog upward.

Anyway, it's often at the end of a cycle that you see those who jumped in at the height deciding it isn't worth waiting for the cycle to play all the way through.

I had three goals going into this crash.

1.) Leading up to the crash, it was my goal to get my sales up as high as I could get them, so that any precipitous percentage drop would still leave me enough room to maneuver. My goal wasn't profits at this point, per se, but building inventory so I'd have something to sell. I also wanted to do this incurring as little debt as possible; keeping my overhead lean, and not having any extra bills.

2.) My goal during the crash was to try to build a bottom, a platform to land on, to constantly shore up whatever I could, and hope that the bottom wasn't too far down.

3.) My goal at the end of the crash and beginning the upturn, was to manage to get to this point without too much debt, so that I wouldn't be handicapped trying to take advantage of any extra room.

It wasn't a perfect plan -- I was still adding product lines when the crash happened and I had to continue to build during the first couple years of the Great Recession. But I managed to do it without too much debt.

The bottom was indeed above the platform I was building -- I could've absorbed some further drop, but not without some pain.

And I feel prepared and ready for any kind of upturn. I'm in good shape to take advantage of it.

I guess we'll see.