How companies handle adversity often serves as a litmus test for success. Take Southern Directional, for instance, an underground-utilities and directional-boring company in Alabama that was flying high after getting hired in 1999 as a subcontractor to lay a fiber optic line across the state of Alabama — part of a national cross-country project.
It was the first job for the newly established company, founded in 1999 in Alabaster, about 15 miles south of Birmingham. “That project opened the door for us,” says Tina Calma, who owns the company with her husband, Matt.
But in early 2001, the company faced a sink-or-swim moment when a
