BY JACKELYN GILL
Managing Editor, WXN Media

The expert opinion was in: Meighen Nehme wasn’t going to make it.

Her business, at least. In the middle of the Great Recession, she decided the Job Shoppe wasn’t shutting doors, but rather opening new ones a few cities over.

And the Fortune Hunters’ cameras caught it all for their 2009 season on CBC. Where she was going to open her second location. Doing business all day. Feeding her six-month-old son Lucah. Who her competitors were. And the advice from an established veteran in the staffing field, with 200 employees and $10 million in revenue.

“Her advice to me was to just work in Windsor,” Meighen says. She even remembers one of the show’s celebrity guests agreeing in a less-than-optimistic way.

That’s the part Meighen didn’t see until the show aired, and it’s the pivotal moment that reinforced that she was actually on the right track.

On one hand, “I was just so defeated,” she says. But on the other, it surfaced something important: “I really believed in what I was doing and that it made sense. I lived in a smaller area. The capacity of my business could only grow. If I had a proven model, then why wouldn’t I try to do this in other areas?”

If the naysayers didn't stop her, neither did anything that came after. The harder moments only fueled her to push further. Because for Meighen, resilience was never going to be one cinematic comeback. It would be something the cameras never caught.

The Recession Test

Meighen was a young entrepreneur when her episode aired, just five years into turning a side hustle into a full-time job.

As a recent graduate in 2004, she was hunting for work. Her friends were in the same boat. “I started picking up the phone, and I would call companies out of the newspaper. I would say, ‘I see that you're looking for this type of candidate, and I have a friend who just graduated. The two of you should really meet,’” she says.

The more connections she made, the more success she found. It was enough to start her one-person agency and secure its first office above a local drug store, trading staffing services with a local financial services company for the space.

More importantly, it was enough to gain the trust of major employers. Those early placements turned into deeper calls about strategy and advice.

Then the jobs dried up.

At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed, her region was one of the hardest hit in Canada, with unemployment rates climbing over 15 percent.

“When people look at the success of a company, they see what's above water. They don't see the big boulders underneath the water.”

“We were directly connected to what was happening in the economy. Companies were slowing down, they weren't hiring, uncertainty was rising, and people became very cautious,” she says. 

She could have downsized her business in response. A lot of companies did. Instead, at the same time as she was welcoming her first son into her family, she chose to grow her footprint. 

“When people look at the success of a company, they see what's above water. They don't see the big boulders underneath the water.” Boulders like remortgaging a home and sacrificing paychecks at a critical moment for her family. 

But what really fuelled her growth was spending more time with her clients. 

“I took the opportunity to get to know the clients and understand their business. I was able to come up with some ideas that I could pitch to them, and they had the time to listen,” she says. 

“That laid a really good foundation for when it started to get busier.”

The Pandemic Test

If the recession tested Meighen’s foundation, the pandemic tested her adaptability.

Because while COVID-19 sparked another spike in unemployment, the strength it demanded of her felt different.

“Not only was it economic, it was also a human challenge,” she says. Employers weren’t just struggling with profitability. They also bore the responsibility of creating safe workplaces despite great uncertainty.

What would remote work look like? How would they navigate shutdowns? Who qualified as an essential employee? For employers across the board, and particularly in the automotive sector where many of her clients worked, “The rules were constantly changing,” she says. “Workers were scared. Families were impacted.”

So she did what had worked before: she got close to the people in it with her. The same instinct that carried her through 2008—slowing down enough to actually understand what her clients were facing—showed up again. Just aimed at a different kind of crisis.

“It's more like 1,000 small decisions that keep showing up."

“We had to make a lot of business decisions, and we had incomplete information,” she says. That’s where empathy turned from a soft skill into a survival skill. “I really had to tap into being calm and communicating with compassion.” Even if she wasn't feeling calm herself.

She had to get creative with her own business, too. Running lean without enough work to keep everyone on her team busy full-time, she did something unconventional: she offered her own people to her clients.

“I knew I had this great payroll person and a great internal HR person,” she says. “So I would go to clients and say, here’s my internal staff. Let’s both utilize their capacity.”

It helped her pay the bills, and it helped the people on her team pay theirs.

The Family Test

While Meighen was busy steering the Job Shoppe through a recession and a pandemic, there was another test of her resilience running underneath it. A personal one.

“My oldest son took his first step, and I wasn't there,” she says.

She was away from home, busy opening her second office. And what she thought was his first step, the one she witnessed when she returned, was actually one of many. “It wasn't until years later that I found out,” she says.

By the time she launched her first U.S. office in Tennessee, she had two more children, including her youngest son, just a few months old. The work meant being gone for a lot of his first year.

So when a client suggested to her, “Women owners who are working as much as they do, and who are in these high C-level positions, really shouldn't have children, because how can you be a mother and then be gone?” guilt hit her. Hard.

“I remember thinking, oh my gosh, is he right? What did I do?” she says. “What kind of wife am I if I’m not even home?”

She thought about it. Her husband wouldn’t be subject to the same commentary. And she came to a conclusion of her own.

“Yes, I'm going to miss things. If the tables were turned and my husband was out and I was home, he would miss them,” she says. Working as a team meant her kids always had someone around, no matter what.

And growing her business ultimately meant Meighen could spend more time with her family. “Fast forward 20 years later, I am at every soccer game, and I'm there with the kids. I'm always showing up for them. That's the flip side of being successful, having that flexibility.”

The Final Cut

Looking back, Meighen doesn’t frame the Great Recession or COVID as dramatic turning points so much as chapters in a longer pattern. Figuring things out before she felt ready to make decisions. Taking that leap of faith without a perfect roadmap.

Because underneath all of it was the same reason she kept going each time: "If I can help somebody find work, and if I can help change their life in some small way—or maybe even in a large way—by changing the direction of their life, I definitely want to do that," she says.

It's why she doesn't describe resilience as one big moment of proof. "It's more like 1,000 small decisions that keep showing up, that keep us learning, and keep me solving problems."

No matter what you see on TV. "It just keeps me believing in the work that really still matters."