A lot of businesses are showing less income for  2008 and are now busy restructuring their business plans for 2009 and beyond.  It is more important than ever to understand how to read both your business Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss to see what you have done over the past few years.  I honestly most businesses are going to have seriously consider new marketing plans, additional education and really analyzing their potential pockets for profit. 

Locally, I think it is really exciting to see how creative some of the businesses have become.  A few have combined their businesses into one space, sharing rent, utilities and a good location.  Other's have added services or products (i.e. the chimney cleaner starting to sell wood and propane stoves, the Photo Gallery offering web design services, the clothing store offering custom printing etc.)

Our most successful new venture as a community was starting a "Farm to Table" program for our school lunches.  Our school lunch program was going to be almost completely cut because of budget cuts and some local citizens put together a grant proposal and found the right person to lead the effort and have attracted almost 4 times the students to eat at school offering local, organic fresh prepared lunches every day.  Now a local Farmer is negotiating a lease of public land from our local Land Bank to produce a lot of the food for the program and four Seattle schools are going to try the same program next year.  This is truly amazing to see in the middle of our national financial challenges.