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By ANDREW DONOHUE, Special to the Daily Transcript
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Following Sept. 11, 2001, Taylor Guitars of El Cajon joined the growing throng of companies forced to lay off workers.
Sales plummeted. It was the first time the company laid off employees in more than two decades, said co-founder and President Bob Taylor.
"All of us that were left, about 350, felt a new sense of gratefulness in our jobs and the work we do," he said, adding that the company held an on-site job fair for the departing employees.
Taylor has since seen productivity rise enough that the company, despite having fewer employees, is essentially back to its ordinary production numbers.
"Everyone seems a little more willing to take care of company assets, including a drastic reduction in waste," he said.
Taylor and CEO Kurt Listug founded the company in 1974 and shaped it into one of the more prominent names in the acoustic guitar industry.
In the last year, Listug said company officials have been forced to watch "important measures of our business performance more closely."
This includes personally traveling to clients to get his own perspective on the market, he said.
The musical instrument industry, Listug said, is still healthy, and people feel lucky to have careers related to making music.
"I think the events of 9/11 showed us we're not isolated from the world's problems here in the U.S.," he said. "And how important our confidence in the future is to the economy continuing to perform."
Though confidence in the economy remains shaky across the country, Taylor said that the business climate has changed for the better since 9/11, if only for a while.
"In my experience, business as a whole became a little more compassionate, at least for a time period. Will it be long lasting? I don't know," he said. "Maybe not as all things equalize again, but we all had a glimpse for maybe the first time in our lives of what things could be like if it all went away as we know it. It must affect things when people have those thoughts."
Donohue is a free-lance writer based in San Diego.
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