What a Sunken Steamboat Can Tell us About Our Re-Opening Economy

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the Kansas City area, you’ve probably never heard of the steamship Arabia. It sank in the Missouri River in 1856 and was found 132 years later. Not much remarkable there. What is remarkable is WHERE the Arabia was found: in the middle of a Kansas cornfield.

So how did a river steamboat find its way to a cornfield? It didn’t. The cornfield found its way to the steamboat. You see, when a river has a major flood, it doesn’t always recede to exactly where it was before the flood.

If you’ve ever flown on a clear day over the Mississippi River along the border between Iowa and Illinois, you might notice some small lakes and ponds in the area that look like the meanders of a mighty river. In fact, they were – until the river flooded, receded and found a new path, leaving those old meanders as orphans in the countryside. So it was for the Arabia. The place where it sank – smack dab in the middle of a mighty river – ended up as Kansas farmland.

So what does this have to do with the COVID crisis? What we are going through now is analogous to a flood of epic proportions. As we start turning our attention to re-opening the economy, those proverbial flood waters are beginning to recede. When they do, you can bet many businesses are going to find themselves in a very different landscape. That will create winners and losers, for sure. But which businesses win and which ones suffer likely will depend less upon the landscape itself and more upon each of those business’ ability to assess, adjust and execute.

Now is the time to start thinking about how the landscape is changing for your business, and how you are going to respond. Because for every river bend that becomes a pond in a cornfield there is a cornfield that just became prime riverfront real estate. Where do you want your business to land?