A friend of mine asked me the other day how my business was faring.  He wondered whether the recessionary environment was hurting me given the fact that many of my customers are in the retail and restaurant markets where times are pretty tough lately.

While I wouldn’t say that the recession is good for business (tighter budgets are never a good thing), there are some positives.  For one, if operators are worried about growing profitability and can’t do it by driving top line revenue (visits are down, it is tough to add new units), they can certainly increase profits by addressing the bottom line by managing their stores more effectively – this is a great lead in for MVaaS discussions.

If that’s not enough, recessions can also cause an increase in the amount of activity that loss prevention groups (big customers of video solutions) need to track.  There’s an article on this in that bastion of literary excellence, The USA Today, titled “More consumers, workers shoplift as economy slows”

So while the recession is not doing me any personal favors (nothing like watching the stock market lose a couple points a day and paying $4.25 a gallon to get you pumped about our nation’s economy) it may in fact be helping me out on the company side.