I have a good friend from college who purchased a sofa at an estate sale. The family of an elderly woman, who had recently passed away, was selling her possessions. The sofa had been covered up in her garage for several years. My friend paid $10 for the piece of furniture. Upon getting it home, however, he discovered that it was not fit to come in his house. He found small holes in the bottom lining and, upon further investigation, found that the sofa had been home to a family of rodents. There were mice droppings littering its insides. So the $10 purchase seemed to be a bust. That is what my friend thought until he started to break the sofa apart to fit it in a trash can. As he pulled the upholstery from the back of the frame, he discovered something rather unusual. There was a black coin purse sewn into the inside of the fabric. He cut the purse loose and opened it to find several rare coins and several hundreds of dollars rolled together. What looked like trash actually turned into something very valuable, that is, once you got past the exterior and took a look at the inside. (You may be tempted to think that I made up this story, but I can tell you that it is true. I stopped by my friend’s house shortly after his discovery and he was giddy as he relived the moment with me and I helped him clean up the remnants of the sofa.)

Now you can use your imagination to begin to fill in the blanks as to how the purse was sewn into the inside of the sofa. More than likely, the elderly lady put it there to keep it secure. I would surmise that she grew up in an era (the Great Depression years) where money in a lending institution, such as a bank, was thought of as a very risky investment. Business failures were commonplace in those years. The stock market had crashed in 1929. So she devised a plan to keep her money safe by reupholstering the couch and hiding the money inside. The only problem is, it appears that she forgot to tell her family. It also appears that she forgot herself. So in the end, the family was happy for someone who would pay $10 to take the smelly old cushion drooper off their hands when they were literally giving away the family treasure.

So what is the moral to the story of the $10 sofa? Try this on for size. Every day you work in your business is an investment in the future. You might be working on some project or performing a task that you will sell to a client and they will pay your business for your work. There is value in what you do. The business pays you and everyone prospers. But let’s say that there is a breakdown in this process. There is an economic downturn. Your clients cannot afford to pay what they once did for your services. The old way of doing business is threatened and your business is faced with a dilemma: do they change the services they are providing and take a risk on a new business line in a sagging economy, or do they lay off workers and ride the bad times out? In either case, your skills are not so valuable any longer. What do you do?

1. You can learn new skills that would make you more valuable to your employer. This might include going back for more schooling or earning some industry distinction that would be marketable for your company. In other words, you could diversify and broaden your skills.

2. You could also change careers and go an entirely different direction. You could see if your skills could be used in another context. If you can find an industry that is not hurting from the overall economic downturn, you might be able to adjust to fit their needs. (They are hard to find, but there are some out there.)

3. You also could sit tight and try to ride out the bad times. Even if you were to lose your job, you could try to convince yourself that your skills will be valued once again in the future and you will get another job doing what you have been doing. This is akin to sewing your future into the back of the couch. This is making the assumption that after the recession, everything will return to how it was before the recession. The only problem with this point of view is that history does not support it happening that way. After each major recession, the way we do business has changed. And people have to change with the needs of business to be able to have a future in business.