Crisis Years

The oil shortages of 1973 triggered an oil price crisis that not only brought Switzerland’s economic engine to a standstill, but also brought about a severe political and economic crisis in virtually the entire Western world. Burckhardt was not spared from the challenges: Many projects were halted, commissions on which work had commenced were cancelled, and those still at the proposal stage were abandoned. In Switzerland, the Federal Council and parliament responded to the crisis by launching a thorough overhaul of its energy policy. 

Burckhardt was forced to reexamine its own resources and deploy them more strategically to prevent the worst from happening. As projects collapsed, a large part of the workforce had to be let go. The drastic reduction from 280 staff to 90 within just one year not only marked a depressing turn of events in the company’s history, but also plunged Martin H. Burckhardt into a personal crisis. Important as they were for the survival of the company, the numerous redundancies nevertheless caused the company founder a great deal of pain.

However, despite these many individual fates, the energy crisis was also recognized as an opportunity. It opened people’s eyes to the need to reduce dependency on imported energy sources, and motivated them to rethink the strategies for design, planning and implementation. At the beginning of the 1970s, seeing the recession looming on the horizon, Burckhardt introduced project-based budgeting. This gave the management a tool that permitted them to check where each individual project stood financially on a quarterly basis. It also permitted the deployment of personnel to be planned in a project-orientated manner and adjusted on an ongoing basis. Project-based budgeting proved to be one of the most important internal tools for the company’s survival during the crisis years. 

The crisis triggered a structural change that resulted in better insulation of buildings, for example. In 1973, the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA) issued its first ever recommendations on thermal insulation. Burckhardt recognized the importance of this development at an early stage and responded with internal training and further training for staff in this new specialist area.