Clamping down on spending like that might be painful for many businesses, but it's been a blessing to countercyclical businesses like Computech. Companies in similar sorts of businesses are careful not to sound like they're profiteering from malaise, but the downturn clearly has its beneficiaries. Used computer resellers, bankruptcy attorneys, business graduate schools, outplacement firms and financial institutions that do mortgage refinancing are just a few. Business schools, many that couldn't compete in the past several years with the lure of dot-com wealth, are suddenly popular. Seattle University has had a 26 percent increase in applications to its graduate business school, and the University of Washington received 10 percent more applications than a year ago.
Colleges have a delicate balance.
Michael McKeon, dean of admissions at Seattle University, said his school hasn't seen it yet, but a downturn could hit parents in the pocketbook hard enough that they would decide not to send to their children to a private college. Computech can relate. It's doing well now, but would be hurting if the economy were so sour that technology spending vanished. Zaccari is feeling fortunate as well that he didn't give in to fears of missing the dot-com mania. The remodeling enabled Computech to broaden its reach from Hewlett-Packard into Sun Microsystems, IBM and other big equipment makers, leveraging a customer list of more than 5,000 in 30 countries.