It's the story at the heart of every economic downturn: decreased demand for goods and services causes a company to cut orders, which in turn results in employee layoffs, causing a further decrease in the demand for goods and services.
And so on, and so on.
With Clark County's unemployment rate hovering around 14 percent, it's an economic narrative as painful as it is prevalent among thousands of Southwest Washington households.
However, at least one local company is veering from the script, showing signs of robust growth in a regional economy only just beginning to rebound.
Vancouver-based Sigma Satellite, Inc., an engineering and consulting firm, added 10 employees since June, nearly doubling its Washington state workforce in less than six months.
Founded in 1994 with offices in Vancouver and Singapore in East Asia, Sigma provides outside engineering and design support for both small companies and Fortune 500 firms.
In "normal" economic times, the recent additions to Sigma's 26-member Vancouver workforce might not make the front page of a regional business publication. But with small shops and big firms still cutting staff or closing their doors, Sigma's seemingly exponential growth is news.
Along with the planned expansion of semiconductor manufacturing subsidiary SEH America's Vancouver operations, Sigma represents another sector of the region's economy with significant growth potential.
Sigma president Bill Huseby attributed his company's success to employee cutbacks at product design and engineering firms across the region. "People are realizing that they still need to get their products out there," Huseby said. "And we specialize on helping them get them to production."
However, one factor contributing to the growth of Sigma's outside consultant business also seems to be the root cause of economists' fears of a "jobless recovery" – a scenario that has some companies increasing output without adding more workers to their payrolls.
"The companies we work with – many of them still aren't hiring people back," Huseby said.
