Terri Petry, Publisher

Where do I begin?  I’d like to first give a giant THANK YOU to my team of volunteers and colleagues for making our 3rd Annual Head to Toe Women’s EXPO such an outstanding event.   The overwhelming consensus from our participants and attendees is that the Women’s EXPO is the ‘must make’ event of the year! It’s nice to know all our hard work is worth it.  

As I write this note, all financial indicators say that the economy is picking up.  Yet every seminar or workshop I’ve attended lately still seems to mention a bleak forecast and some expert or another gives words of encouragement for weathering the storm.   I have the good fortune of personally speaking with business owners on a regular basis, yet the stories and conversations I’m hearing aren’t in tune with the financial picture of recovery.  I attended the Mercer County Economic Summit earlier this year and an Economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia spoke and actually presented an extremely understandable presentation including a slideshow demonstrating every recession in American history.  The graphs showed how this recession was already the longest in duration and deepest in severity.  

He did demonstrate how history had repeated itself and everything happens in cycles. That being said, he projected us seeing a slight recovery by June this year and although we’d love to see the indexes continue to rise from that point, they will basically remain steady & level for several months going forward.  The years of excess are over.  

I mention this not because I want to be negative, far from it, I am the consummate optimist. However, I am a realist.  I want to verbalize to our readers that it’s OK to be worried, but don’t let it consume you. It’s alright to adjust your spending and business & personal practices to adjust to the reduction in revenues or lose of clientele.  We all have to make adjustments.  Please know that everything happens for a reason.   I have personally found some of the truest relationships with my customers in dealing with these trying times.     

It would be foolish of me not to mention that because every business has to think of better, more creative ways of reaching new potential customers and can no longer rely on word of mouth exclusively, advertising in Mercer County Woman puts your message in front of over 50,000 readers.  To my knowledge, our advertising rates are the least expensive in Mercer County and we boast about our very, loyal readers and people constantly remark about our fabulous distribution.  Our motto is “Anyone Can Advertise Your Business; We Promote It. There Is A Difference!”