Adventures in Babysitting

If you want to find a babysitter in New York, you can go to myJambi.com, enter your specific needs and get an instant list of qualified sitters who match your criteria. You can check out their profiles and read reviews and ratings by other parents. Or, if you want a plumber in Chicago, a landscaper in Portland, or a Web designer in Santa Fe, myJambi can help out with that, too.

But myJambi, a three year old New York-based company, has only its three founders to turn to when a job needs getting done these days.

Poised for serious growth only a matter of months ago, those plans are now on hold. The company’s five full-time employees were let go. Big plans to expand into numerous service categories are being honed to a handful, with a big emphasis on babysitting. And the number of cities it serves has also been greatly pared back. Meanwhile, the company’s three co-founders, who had graduated to managerial roles, are now back to the grunt work of coding, design work and trafficking ad orders…

Retooling: Flex Time

We don’t envy anybody in the recruiting business right now, but we think Jeff Lundwall and JD Rehm have a good plan for the recession.

When they started media search firm Mercury Group a few short years ago, they established three lines of business: executive recruiting, sales training (they’re two former ad sales execs) and career counseling. While the executive search business took off and Mercury established a foothold with major publishing firms, those “value add” lines took a backseat.

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Retooling: “Hibernate” Your Business

For a lot of companies, it’s going to be a long, cold winter — even as that winter turns to spring, summer, fall and back again. Instead of toughing it out with bridge-loan band-aids, fancy resource footwork or repeated promises to customers, one company bowed out without bowing out. In the CEO’s term, it went into “hibernation.”

In a story by Rafe Needleman on Cnet, Big Moving Picture CEO David Knight laid out his predicament and his strategy: His company, which affixes cameras to military aircraft during air shows and displays the live feed on large screens to audiences on the ground, was about to launch last fall. When the market fell precipitously in September, he put things on hold.