Meridian Group President Maggie Good has a front-row seat to the longest recession since World War II -- and she didn't even have to pay for her ticket.

Ms. Good's Fourth Avenue firm is a practitioner of turnaround consulting, or the art of helping companies and their lenders make the best of bad situations. Too much debt is at the root of many of the bad situations, complicating the process of "working out" a company's soured loans, either by replacing them with new debt the company and its lenders can live with or liquidation.

"I have never seen anything like what we're going through now," said Ms. Good, 58, a Fargo, N.D., native.

Ms. Good earned her wings in the mid-1980s as treasurer at Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, where she helped the company survive a $350 million debt default without jumping the track into bankruptcy.

"The creditors got a lot more money than they thought they would get," she recalled.

Back then, if a company could not repay its debt, oftentimes it was liquidated. Banks recovered what losses they could, wrote off the rest, and moved on, Ms. Good said.

But as companies and lenders took on greater, more sophisticated risks, many turned to people like Ms. Good to help banks recover more and save more companies. Meridian's business is equally split between representing companies and the banks that lend to them.

Nowadays, turnaround consulting is a profession with certification and continuing education requirements similar to those for accountants. Ms. Good has been certified as a CTP -- certified turnaround professional -- by the Turnaround Management Association, which has nearly 10,000 members.

She struck out on her own in 1988 when her employer at the time, Bradford Services, relocated to North Carolina. Her first assignment came from a bank that could not understand a company's inability to repay a loan. Ms. Good ended up running the company for a short period of time, experience that brought more clients to Meridian.

Since then, the firm's client list has included Glenshaw Glass, where Ms. Good is the chief responsible officer; Eichleay Corp, where Meridian was the court-appointed receiver; and Heartland Steel, a $350 million Indiana steel processor that Ms. Good is in charge of liquidating. She also served on the unsecured creditors committee in a Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel bankruptcy.

While Meridian's 12 employees also advise clients on corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions, "Right now, we're doing a lot of turnaround work," Ms. Good said.

The workload can be traced to the seismic shift in the credit climate that occurred a year ago. Banks went from lending aggressively to turning off the spigot within a matter of days. As the well ran dry, companies responded more quickly than they did in previous downturns, sending ripples throughout the economy.

"I think companies have been more proactive than ever before," Ms. Good said. "The fact that everybody is in the same boat is making people react faster."

Pittsburgh has not suffered as much as other regions because of the diversification away from steel and the region's limited exposure to the auto industry, she said. Credit conditions aren't as bad because the real estate market never overheated and banks entering the Pittsburgh market such as First Niagara, First National and TriState Capital provide additional sources of credit, Ms. Good said.

What worries her is how the many companies devastated by the recession will be able to recover. Ms. Good said she knows of companies where revenue is down 25 percent to 60 percent. Companies that were able to service their debt based on what revenues were in 2006 or 2007 may not return to those levels for some time, and cost cuts may not be able to make up the shortfall, she said.

"My concern is that their sales will only go back to where they're down 20 percent" from peak levels, she said. "You can only push creditors to a certain point. You can only cut costs to a certain point."

As a starting point, Ms. Good asks companies to work out a recovery plan based on the assumption that revenue will stay at current levels.

"The recession is not going to go away very quickly. It's going to have a dampening effect for a long time," she said.

Another concern is the pressure on bank "workout specialists" whose responsibility it is to resolve problem loans.

"I've never seen them have the workload they have now. They are getting so many creditors in the workout department that they don't have time to work with them," she said. "They have a shorter fuse."

Ms. Good says some assignments can be so intense that her body will hurt for days. But the work is rewarding and has given her a new perspective on human nature.

"I am always surprised by the loyalty employees show to a company undergoing extreme financial stress," Ms. Good said. "I assumed everyone would leave when the going got tough, but usually people work harder and longer, and many times with less pay, to support the turnaround process."