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John Bostick, CEO of Lucrum Inc., is proud to still be standing on the New Economy field where so many of his dot-com clients fell.
His downtown data warehousing and mining firm was nearly a victim of the tech wreck - and it is still not out of the woods. But with $1.7 million in new investment from his business associates and fellow entrepreneurs, Bostick, who remains the majority owner, said he is on sure footing and feels optimistic about the future.
"You realize that business in good times gets exponentially better, but when times get bad, it's exponentially worse. It snowballs - and to stop that snowball is the art of business," he said.
Like many high-tech executives, Bostick was tempted by the rising fortunes of the dot-coms. He deviated from Lucrum's usual strategy of working for big corporations and began taking on unproven but apparently up-and-coming young clients.
The company had sales of $13.6 million in 2000 - the same year Bostick was named an Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year," and Lucrum made Inc. magazine's list of the country's 500 fastestgrowing private firms.
He was tiding high until the dot-com bubble burst and much of the money owed to Lucrum became impossible to collect. In...