NEW ORLEANS - Laird Willis works on the winch he designed and his Houma company manufactured. He is hoping it will become popular with the oil industry.
But these are the toughest times for Laird. At age 47, he is starting over, virtually from scratch.
"Unfortunately we lost three more employees," he said "We had to relocate to a smaller place."
When he first called in January, things were bleak, business off 80 percent between the hurricanes and the recession, and he was urgently seeking work to keep his three year old company open, and his workers employed.
"You're faced with losing your dream, everything you've dreamed of getting going," he said.
Once Laird employed 13 people. Now there are just four, and he moved to a small machine shop just half the size of the old one, trying to get a new start, but while he has a couple of jobs lined up, there is still so little work.
"It's been really tough," welder Carlos Hernandez said. "You work maybe one day a week, and take off another two or three days."
At the time of the first report, Laird Willis was seeking a Small Business Administration loan to keep his company going through the tough times that started with Hurricane Gustav and continued with the recession. He says the SBA denied him three times, and now he is in the process of filing bankruptcy.
"SBA, the government is going to bail out big business period," Willis said with frustration, "but the small guy like myself, you know you're left to drown."
Bankruptcy is hurting more than his business, he says he is losing his home as well, because of an earlier SBA loan he needed to repair Katrina damage.
"They're gonna foreclose, and I found that out after I filed bankruptcy," Willis said. "I'm not going to get my home. So now my wife and I are trying to find a place to live before they foreclose."
But Laird Willis refuses to give up hope, a lesson his son sees in action every day.
"He's pretty strong willed," saidDarrick Willis, a draftsman for the company. "He doesn't want to give up, he doesn't want to let this beat him down, he doesn't want it to get us down. We don't want to fail, none of us do really."
"I am positive," Laird Willis said. "You have to be positive. You just can't let this beat you down. You take it a day at a time, and fight what comes up that day."
