At this time last year I told the whole team here at HBS, that I could not argue with the economic facts that point to a massive global economic train-wreck in our future, but I was not convinced that it will happen in 2011, and would not, therefore, use the doom-and-gloom scenario as an excuse to freeze salaries or benefits, as we were forced to do in 2009 when sales fell 25% when the economy “contracted”.

In fact, we had had a good year in 2010 and I wanted to reward each of them, whom I consider my best friends, for their performance, expertise, dedication and customer friendliness, which largely accounted for our success.

So I gave everybody a raise, and told them, if times get tough, we will all be on the same train and we will all ride it uphill and downhill together. And that’s the way it will be.

That’s how I planned to be successful in 2011. It worked. That set the tone for 2011. Instead of concentrating on the negative, like the NEWS did, we all pitched in to make the company and our service more perfect, so we could better serve our current clients and win a greater share of the potential customers out there. We also concentrated on outperforming our competitors in terms of the client experience by improving on hundreds of details on all levels of the business. We weren’t trying to re-invent ourselves, just improve upon what we already do well, to set the bar higher for excellence in our tiny industry of Company Formation Services.

Every year, for 30 years, I’ve done this. I plan for greater success every year by consistently improving every aspect of the company, and getting everyone involved in the details.

We invested in making our information and services available across the whole spectrum of the web including social media, mobile devices and notebooks. We set up an active Facebook page, and a Twitter account, and produced 13 videos to walk clients through every question and quandary when it comes to forming a Delaware LLC or Corporation. We will soon be QR coding your invoices so you can access your account, and pay your Franchise Tax and Registered Agent fee in less than a minute! Poof! If compliance can be made simple, we will make it so simple for you.

If you have a smart phone, try our mobile site. Just go to the same url: www.delawareinc.com and it will recognize your phone and give you the “Wham Bam Thank You Mama” version of our info.

But I have to admit, in 2011, we were very lucky. Despite the economic reality we all faced, more people wanted to form new companies and when we asked them why they wanted to start out fresh at a time like this many of them totally dismissed the notion that times are tough and said, ”because this is THE TIME” for them. And they are right.

I started Harvard Business Services in 1981 when the economy was equally depressed. But the USA is not a depressed nation and we always prevail over economic challenges. Americans love a challenge. Americans love to work and to be the best at what they do. Americans are also innovative, and free to innovate, which is our big advantage.

2012, the election year: What policies will govern the country in 2013 and beyond? The voters will decide that. This year, it is more important than ever, that you VOTE. In the USA, VOTERS determine the future, not the politicians.

What Our Clients Want: When I talk to our clients, nobody cares what the dollar will be worth, or what gold will be worth or what the interest rate will be on treasury bills. Really, they don’t care. Do you?

What people we talk to care about is activity in the marketplace. When are the buyers going to make a comeback and start calling again? Let’s get the phones ringing, let’s get the sales folks showing people properties, let’s get the customers making offers, and deals, and buying things. Let’s get the banks making swift and easy loans again. Let’s get this economy rockin’! That’s what we’re they’re saying.

So, my advice for 2012, which is free advice and worth every penny of what you pay for it, but no more, is to invest in yourself. Invest in your company no matter how small or how large it is. Pour your money back into your own company’s infrastructure and environment and security. Invest in your people. Raise their level of education and their standard of living and challenge them to do more.  And they will. Build an emergency operation center to avoid shutting down if one strikes. Plan for the train wreck, even if it doesn’t happen.

Plan ahead and Go Ahead: By all means, if you’re just starting out, you should know that you’ve picked the very best time in recent history, in my opinion, to start your own company. Survival will determine the fittest but in these uncertain times, start-up companies with dedicated sensible owners often have the advantage over established companies with good balance sheets.

Opportunity is alive and well here in the USA. GO FOR IT! Make 2012 your year to form a company.

There is little the media like more than knocking someone off their high horse.  If you don’t get in the saddle in the first place, that temptation is eliminated. When might we climb on a high horse?  When we are asked the same question innumerable times, when the question comes from profound ignorance and  when the reporter asks a “gotcha” questions designed to catch you up.

Let’s deal with how to avoid copping an attitude in each of these circumstances.

That tired, old question.  A couple of years ago I got a phone call from a long time client who was having a problem with an entertainment personality.  It seemed that this young woman, tiring of a very routine question, was rolling her eyes, heaving sighs and sometimes just snapping angrily at the reporter asking the routine question.  She thought that since she’d answered the question for other reporters previously, there was no need to address it again.  When I spoke to her I recommended that she think of an interview as a performance.  “You sing the same song over and over, don’t you?  Well, perform the same answer.  Each reporter — especially broadcast reporters — want that soundbite delivered fresh for them.”

You want to make the routine answer to the routine questions sound and feel fresh, too. The late Peter Falk was a champion at this.  For 30 years he played the role of the disheveled detective, Lt. Columbo.  When asked what about Columbo appealed to the audience, Falk appeared to think hard, and then work out an answer that essentially said, “People see themselves in Columbo.”  But he ACTED out the answer, making it appear that it was forming in his mind at the moment he spoke it.  No doubt Falk’s answer was as convincing the last time he delivered it as it was the first time — three decades earlier — because he made it look and sound fresh each time.  He performed it.

Had Falk snapped, “Oh, come on.  You KNOW what makes Columbo appealing, he’s like all of us.”  THAT would have been the story — his attitude would have overwhelmed his message.

The dumb question.  Increasingly, as newsrooms consolidate and as outlets try to save money by dropping experienced (read highly-paid) reporters for just-out-of-school rookies, you get questions soundly grounded in the journalist’s total ignorance.  You would expect that when a reporter is assigned a story, he would do at least cursory research on it before interviewing anyone.  But these days reporters are expected to be highly productive and quantity of stories is more valued in many outlets than the quality of the story so the reporter may not have had time to inform himself.  (And, sad to say, there are some reporters who, even with the time, won’t bother.)  The problem with answering in the condescending tone that such questions warrant is that the final story is in the reporter’s hands and if he feels he’s being patronized, he may try to get even.  It is said there is no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb answers.  I’m here to tell you that there are lots — legions — of dumb questions.  But giving a a condescending answer to one is even dumber than the question.  If a reporter’s question clearly indicates that he doesn’t understand the subject matter, patiently explain the facts and do it without showing your justifiable exasperation.

The gotcha question.  In this instance the reporter asks you a question you can’t answer because you don’t know the answer or any answer would be incriminating (“When did you stop beating your wife?”)  Typical of the former is the new stock-in-trade of political reporters: asking an official or a candidate the name of an obscure office-holder in a far-away land that the reporter has just gleaned from a last-minute Google search.  In either case — “When did you stop beating your wife?”  and “What’s the name of the environmental  minister in Austria?” — it’s important not to get angry or defensive. A good approach is to label the question.

“When did you stop beating your wife?”

“No matter how I answer that question, my response will sound incriminating.  In point of fact, my wife and I have a wonderful, mutually-supportive relationship…..”

“What’s the name of the environmental minister in Austria?”  “That’s a “gotcha” question.   I don’t know, but I’ll find out.  What I can tell you is…..”

The key to a successful outcome when confronted with one of these questions is to avoid copping a defensive attitude, to label the question for what it is and to use a bridge from the question to your own agenda.

Like Washington and the cherry tree assassination, Uncle Don’s gaffe never happened.  It was totally made up.  And here’s the ironic part: the author of the mic mishap fable was a newspaper columnist in Baltimore (where Don’s show wasn’t heard).   So we have a fake news story about a blooper that never happened being used to teach news interview subjects to be wary of what they say in proximity to a microphone.  I guess those who use the fable — like parents to dispense the cherry tree story — feel that the ends justify the means.

Years ago, I dispensed with Uncle Don in media training workshops when I learned it wasn’t true.  Besides the news, with great regularity, supplied me with real examples of people opening their mouths in front of open microphones and broadcasting thoughts that were better locked in their mental vaults.

Citing three or four of the most recent examples — they ARE endless — I tell my clients to treat a microphone like a gun.  Anyone familiar with gun safety has been taught to treat all guns as if they are loaded.  Similarly, I recommend treating all microphones as if they are on, recording or broadcasting live.   I like to add, “Never say anything in proximity to a microphone that you don’t want the world to hear.”

This may seem self-evident, but again and again we are treated to people who should know better — including broadcasters — saying stupid, embarrassing or counterproductive things in the presence of a microphone, only to have their off-the-cuff remarks become on-the-web curiosities and then in-the-news scandals.

There is an added caution to “Treat a Microphone Like a Gun.”  And that is, treat a reporter as if he is a microphone.  Just because a reporter has put away his pad, pencil and digital recorder doesn’t mean he’s off-duty.  He is recording you in his head.

In fact, when I was a newspaper reporter I found it useful to emulate the TV detective created by the late Peter Falk, Lt. Columbo, and to throw out a “one more thing” question as I strolled casually toward the door of an interview subject’s office.   Thinking the interview over, they sometimes responded with far greater candor than they had during the official, formal interview.

Incidentally, encountering a reporter in a restaurant or at a bar is still encountering a reporter.  When a good story is in the air, any reporter — in any stage of relaxation — will focus like a laser and begin making mental notes.  The French ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Bernard, learned this the hard way.  At a 2001 dinner party at the London home of Lord Black — at the time the owner of the third-largest newspaper publishing concern in the world — the ambassador made a particularly undiplomatic and scatological reference to Israel.

For an ambassador to do something like this anywhere, anytime is dumb.  To do it in front of a room full of reporters is suicidal, at least career-wise.  There was no way that the many journalists at the dinner were going to ignore that one.  Knowing reporters, I suspect most of them had mentally written their stories before coffee and dessert.

So when around a microphone — or a reporter — emulate the real Uncle Don.  Don’t say anything  you don’t want the world to hear.

The story was about a large employer, which I’ll call “The Enterprise.”  The Enterprise is encountering some rough weather including worsening conditions that has led it to some downsizing.  The Enterprise’s chief executive was quoted this way in the newspaper:  “We’re not adrift. And the vision is not gone. And we have a plan. We have a very sound plan.”

I always encourage clients, when formulating an answer to a media question, to include the sense of the question in the answer, so that the response can stand alone as a soundbite or direct quote.  The sole exception to this rule is if the question is hostile or contains negative words.  While I was not there when the chief executive’s interview took place, I am confident that the quote I cited came in response to some variation of this question:  “Is The Enterprise adrift under your watch?  Does it (or, do you) lack vision?”

The executive snapped up the bait.  Omitting the question and just running with the answer, the reader is left with the impression that the whole matter of visionless, drifting leadership came from the executive.

Similarly, if you’ve ever read “This is not a disaster waiting to happen,” or “This is not a desperation move” in an interview, you can bet it came in response to “Isn’t this a disaster waiting to happen” or “Isn’t this a desperation move?”   By omitting the question and just using the answer that contains the negatives it appears the interview subject brought the negative up for consideration.

So how do you answer “Isn’t this a disaster waiting to happen?” and its kindred questions?  In a previous post, I wrote about my four-steps to get from a tough question to your agenda point:  acknowledge the question with a short form answer, build a verbal bridge, deploy an agenda point and, finally, shut up (don’t revisit the hostile question or the negative words.)

The executive, faced with, “Is The Enterprise adrift under your watch?” could have answered, “No”  As far as short form answers go, “no” is unparalleled — it’s the second shortest word in the English language  (the shortest being “I.”)  If the reporter wants to use the negative word adrift, it has to come from him, it didn’t come from the executive.  Then he might have built a bridge, “As a matter of fact.” (Also short).   And then deployed his agenda point: “We (or I) have a vision, a plan, a very sound plan.”    “No.  As a matter of fact, we have a vision, a plan, a very sound plan” is a lot more positive response to a negative question than “We’re not adrift. And the vision is not gone. And we have a plan. We have a very sound plan.

- Wayne Gretzky