Under pressure to start generating revenue from business customers, McCue quickly reoriented the company's small sales force to start concentrating on Global 1,000 prospects. And as he hired more salespeople, he sought those who had experience in selling software and call-center solutions to large corporations. McCue says that one of his biggest challenges, in addition to redirecting the sales force to larger companies, has been recalibrating the expectations of Tellme's employees. "When I speak with people here, I explain that the great businesses were in it for the long term," he says. "It took AOL nearly 20 years to get to where it is now. It's like climbing Mount Everest. To me, the ultimate vision is when we're able to have a large collection of businesses and consumers in a community that we've built on the phone. That's the summit. Companies that get up there are worth a lot.

"But you have to zigzag your way up the mountain -- you can't just helicopter up to the top," McCue warns. "And you have to weather storms, like this storm that we're weathering right now in the stock market. You just have to say, 'We're on a journey, and eventually, we're going to reach the summit.' It may take longer than you expected, but all of us have to keep our eyes on the summit."

Scott Kirsner (kirsner@att.net) is a Fast Company contributing editor based in Boston. He's always on the move.

Sidebar: Fast Forward

How do people with big ambitions respond to an era of downsizing? "You can worry, you can pray, or you can do something," says Steven Berglas, a clinical psychologist who until June was on the staffs of Harvard's McLean Hospital and the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. Berglas now teaches a course at UCLA's Anderson School called "The Psychology of the Entrepreneurial Spirit." His latest book, published earlier this year, is Reclaiming the Fire: How Successful People Can Overcome Burnout (Random House). Here's his advice for staying fast in slower times.

Cut big fast. If you take the free Cokes away, and then you take away the BlackBerry pagers, it becomes Chinese water torture. A lot of companies nickel-and-dime their cost cutting, which, along with external bad news, imposes upon everybody a depressogenic state of mind. The best thing to do is make a one-shot, one-time-only cut. Then it's over, and you've let everyone who is left know that they have ownership and control, psychologically speaking.

Conserve resources, but don't stop taking risks. In difficult times, companies tend to develop a circle-the-wagons mentality. But that mind-set leaves all kinds of opportunities for competitors to exploit when economic growth gets started again. The best time to innovate is now. The tendency to become conservative in the face of economic threat only means that a year later, some startup is going to eat your lunch.

Look on the bright side, but don't be blind to reality. You can be optimistic in tough times. For example, you may have less competition when you're hiring employees in this environment. An unwillingness to be deterred is a positive. But if it's done with the notion that "there's nothing wrong with the economy," that's denial. Optimism means being like Andy Grove or Lance Armstrong, who fought their cancer and were completely single-minded about it. Denial means being like the alcoholic with an ulcer who toasts the fact that he doesn't also have a brain tumor.

Bad news isn't always bad news. The paradox of the entrepreneur is that he can take bad news better than he can take good news. If you tell an entrepreneur, "You have another fight on your hands that's necessary in order to realize your dream" -- that's like throwing down the gauntlet. It was really disconcerting when the venture capitalists had their signs up saying, "Open House -- Easy Money Available." There was no challenge. It was odd.