VICKY: I was doubling my business. We had to move. We were out of space. We moved into this building in March.

January after our move in, the economy is like -- my forecasts were where are the orders? Where are the orders we had in our forecast? Where are the orders? Now we're here in this new, big facility. Forecast isn't coming in and I have an overhead that would support X amount of dollars and I'm bringing in Y. That doesn't work very well.

HATTIE: So the sales dropped.

VICKY: Sales dropped off the charts. I had to cut a million dollars out of my budget, and I had a meeting with my management team and I had looked at the financials and I knew what revenue we were generating. I had to make some good assumptions about based on a real unknown future what we probably could do and based on that I had to look at where our expenses were. How we were staffed for each department and had to go through each category and scale it back to a lesser number. The two biggest categories of expense are the facility costs and your employees. So, obviously we can't do much with the facility.

HATTIE: Stuck with a lease. A seven year lease.

VICKY: Seven year lease.

HATTIE: At the high side of the market because you did the deal before things got bad.

VICKY: Things were going pretty well. So that leaves employees and the rest of the expenses. Well there are things we can cut out of expenses. We can get leaner. There are things we can do, but it's certainly not going to be a million dollars because we're a pretty thrifty company anyway. So obviously we had to have layoffs. So in the meeting, it was, here's where it's going to come from. We don't have the details yet, but we're meeting on Tuesday. We're going to have a half a day session and we're going to decide exactly what we have to do and where it's going to come from. I promise you that it's not going to be long in coming. You're going to know on Tuesday what the decision is, so you're not going to have to agonize over what's happening. Made the decision in March. Made cuts in April after the economy went south in January. Many people didn't do anything until after 9/11. So when 9/11 came, we'd already made our cuts. After 9/11, we'd already done it so we didn't have to make any more adjustments. We were already down there.

HATTIE: So the big piece of advice is. VICKY: Don't wait. Don't wait.

HATTIE: I hear two pieces. Don't wait, but before that, know the benchmarks.

VICKY: Know the benchmarks. HATTIE: So that when you do have to take action, you take the right kind of action.

VICKY: Right. (Voiceover) I am so happy, I love what I do. I have a passion for it obviously, and we are doing well. I have great people.