Contractors
Put Recession
Lessons to Work
hen the Massachusetts building economy
collapsed in 1990, remodeler Paul
Eldrenkamp says, "It was like driving off
a cliff. I can still remember the precise moment I
knew I'd been caught out. I was driving home
from this job that I really didn't want to take
because it had red flags all over it. It was a stinker
from the word go, but I realized I had to take it
because I simply had nothing else out there. I
swore I'd never let that happen to me again."
Eldrenkamp's business dropped 50% over the
following two years before slowly rebounding. As
every New England contractor knows, he wasn't
alone. Thousands