Housing Industry Crisis

So how is the housing industry crisis affecting small business? Well, I cannot speculate about other businesses, but I can speak about our situation, in light of the news lately about the housing industry and prevailing financial crisis. Shan recently sent out an email to our team entitled “State of the Union”, and I thought it might be a good idea to do the same for our blog. “Like any good President,” Shan said, “there will be bad/good news followed by a short pep talk.”

The bad news is that the economy is not looking good. There is indeed a financial crisis facing us and potentially an economic recession. No need to belabor that point, as we have been hearing all about it for the last several weeks on the news. The good news is that the sky has not fallen yet, and we seem to have come into this with fairly strong company fundamentals. I am not qualified to comment any further on that…I’ll leave that up to the experts.

As for Jenkins Custom Homes, we do not depend on credit to run our business. We have often been criticized for this decision, having been called ‘lacking in sophisticated financial finesse’. We even had a business consultant call us ‘foolish’ once. However, it was our Fathers, both Shan’s and mine, who instilled in us the importance of keeping cash on hand and not depending on banks for our business and personal success. So we have. I say all this to let you know that it was this ‘lack of sophisticated financial finesse’ that has allowed us to be insulated from the current financial crisis. Since we have no need to borrow money to operate, we are not affected by the frozen credit market.

Now for the pep talk. This is America. Shan & I believe in capitalism and the ability for Americans to get through this. In fact, it seems to make most Americans more resolved when the word ‘crisis’ is used. This country has faced far worse times than these. I get frustrated when I hear the defeatist attitude coming through the news media. Don’t they know who they are talking to? We are Americans. We will prevail. We always do.

End of pep talk.

-Bethany Jenkins