Around 2019, when I was Global Marketing Director at Funnelback, recession forecasts were everywhere, and we spent part of that stretch preparing for one. The downturn everyone was predicting didn’t arrive on schedule. What came instead, in 2020, was a different kind of shock, and the preparation turned out to matter more than anyone planning it could have known. This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.
What we did then
The work itself was unglamorous. We cut experiments that weren’t paying their way and moved that spending into channels where the signal was clear. We simplified the stack so fewer things changed hands between tools and people, and we built lightweight automations where manual steps had piled up. We also stress-tested the budget against a 50 percent cut to see what would break first. The least visible piece was making sure everyone on the team knew where the data lived and how to read it, which sounds minor until you need it quickly. None of it would have made an interesting slide, and if the year that followed had stayed quiet, it would probably have been remembered as housekeeping done under a cloud.
What 2020 did to the plan
Then 2020 arrived, and higher education, a very core vertical for us, lost its footing. We were selling to teams that had lost their playbook almost overnight. Because we had already built the operation to run lean, we kept shipping and kept the trust we had with those customers. We had prepared for a recession; the disruption that came had another shape entirely, and the preparation held anyway.
That mismatch is the part I find most instructive. Plans built around one specific scenario tend to fail when a different one shows up. Ours didn’t, and I think the reason is that very little of what we did was really about the recession.
Why the plain parts held
The usual account of recession readiness is financial, centered on reserves and runway. The budget stress test fits that account well enough. The effect I’d point to now, years later, is structural. A simpler stack meant fewer handoffs to break when people were stretched. A team that could read its own data didn’t have to wait for a report to know whether something was working, and the budget stress test had already shown us which pieces were load-bearing, so when decisions had to come quickly, much of the argument about priorities had already happened.
Research on earlier downturns points in a similar direction. Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen studied 4,700 public companies across three recessions for Harvard Business Review and found that only about 9 percent came out stronger than they went in. The firms with the best odds of pulling ahead afterward, about 37 percent, were those that cut costs through operational efficiency while still investing in marketing, R&D and assets. Firms that only cut costs had odds of about 21 percent. The line the study draws runs between two kinds of cost cutting, and the efficiency kind is what leaves room to keep investing.
Our experience was one company in one vertical, and I’d be wary of treating it as proof of anything. Still, the pattern is familiar. The work that let us keep going to market in 2020 was efficiency work, mostly fewer tools and cleaner handoffs, and the marketing kept running in part because the system underneath it had become cheaper and easier to run.
Preparing for something that doesn’t come
The awkward thing about readiness work is that its value is hard to see when the predicted event fails to arrive. If 2020 had been an ordinary year, our prep would have looked like a tidy-up with a slightly anxious motive. Budget conversations tend to reward spending against the most likely forecast, and a forecast that doesn’t materialize makes the people who prepared for it look overcautious.
I still don’t have a clean answer to how a leadership team should account for work whose payoff depends on a shock nobody can name in advance, or whether that work can be defended in a planning meeting without a crisis to point to. Our case resolved itself only because a shock arrived, and nobody planned that part. And if the preparation that mattered turns out to be efficiency that would have been worth doing in any year, was it ever really recession prep at all?