Use crisis as stepping stone to desired business success

A crisis when managed well can pave the way to great opportunity. PHOTO | FILE 

By MURORI KIUNGA

In Summary

• When a business is in a crisis, it is good for the owners or managers to sit down and reflect on what could be on the other side of the coin and seek ways of exploiting it for the good of all.

When people venture into business, few expect the crisis and challenges ahead. Regardless of how well you are prepared or how diligently you conduct your business, tough moments will come that will truly test your leadership.

It could be in form of opportunities, like getting more orders than you can execute with your limited resources. It could be failure to get good and reliable employees when you need them most or having to figure out how to meet a tight deadline for a deal that can radically change your fortunes.

Crisis could also result from product failure, business failure or being auctioned and finding out how to rise again from scratch with the baggage of the past and without the much-needed start up capital.

Such setbacks which are normal in business do not spell doom or mark the end of the road. There is always a way out if one has the will and determination to remain committed to the cause.

Most people when facing seemingly insurmountable crisis tend to give up too soon or succumb to exhaustion, stress and fatigue that renders them uncreative and unproductive, thus compounding the recovery process.

A crisis when managed well can pave the way to great opportunity. It can be a time of learning and implementing new ideas that may open wonderful doors into the vast future. It does not have to be a time of defeat, exhaustion or depression.

Most business leaders have been made out of crisis and several great businesses have themselves evolved out of, if not birthed by a crisis.

I know of a great business that was founded as a family business more than three decades ago. After few years it experienced turbulence that rendered it technically insolvent. The founder had virtually no way of saving the business on his own.

Luckily, a young man had just lost a job after his previous employer closed shop. By default, the young man found a soft landing in this ailing but promising venture. His expertise and capital injection from his savings turned around what had been written off. Today it is a big corporation with several other shareholders who joined it later.

As Napoleon Hill said, every adversity, every failure, every heart ache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

When a business is in a crisis, it is good for the owners or managers to sit down and reflect on what could be on the other side of the coin and seek ways of exploiting it for the good of all.

Most crises in business are precipitated by solvable things such as uncontrolled expenses, lack of co-ordination among the team members, having the wrong employees or having the right people but on the wrong seats or and lack of focus.

In other words, some crises serve as a warning that something is missing in the system or need to be done in a different ways.

Others come as a warning that something is not functioning or you have neglected some core areas that are more important. It helps you to focus on what really matters.

During crisis we are forced to focus on that which is most important and reduce unnecessary baggage that drain the owner’s energy and sap the business resources. It forces us to examine ourselves and in the words of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, “to know where the rain began beating us”.