How Not To Die

June 4th

June 4, 2025

When you’re a founder of a business you spend most days feeling like not only is the whole world against you but it’s also throwing everything at you including the kitchen sink. However some days are worse than others. It is inevitable as you build your business that at some point you will face an existential crisis- one of those awful moment when you realise that unless  you get it exactly right over the next few days or weeks then there is a very good chance that you are going to go under. You are threading the needle.

Like almost all founders I’ve suffered this a number of times. One of the worst ones was when the business was absolutely flying. We’d just hit our 10 year anniversary, had a record year for growth, record revenues, new markets opened, more clients on boarded and new offices on the ground. You name it we were doing it and doing it well. So it was something of a shock to say the least when I walked in one sunny morning for a casual chat with the CFO only for the world to fall apart. What started as a normal weekly chat about cashflow and forecast quickly snowballed. A couple of numbers looked wrong and then turned into more that were out before eventually realising that months earlier a relatively minor number had been  inputted incorrectly in the back of a spreadsheet. It didn’t look too bad so I left him to investigate. An hour later he told me that a projected seven figure annual profit had suddenly evaporated and tuned into a seven figure loss. I presumed he was joking. Maybe it was an April Fool’s day joke. Once I realised it was only February and so it couldn’t be an April fool thing  I went into some form of catatonic shock- hardly an ideal response.

So, what do you do? At some point there will be an internal stuff up or big client will cancel or not pay or there will be a big shock like the financial crisis or Covid or something. The only certainty is that it will happen. Elon Musk calls it staring into the abyss, knowing at any single moment you can make the wrong decision and you’re gone.

How you react is crucial.

The first thing is not to bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away. Hope is not a good strategy. Once you’ve faced up and admitted the scale of the issue the next thing is to make sure you survive. As Rupert Lee-Browne , founder and CEO of Caxton says, you have to make sure you’re still standing at the end of it. Once you’re gone, you’re gone and its very hard to start again and get back to where you were so survival at all costs is imperative. Don’t be conservative in your thinking and looking for solutions – nothing is off the table.

Angus Stevens , co-founder and CEO of Start Beyond, always has a ‘How not to die ‘ plan in place. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bootstrapconfidential_founders-activity-7335565735324282881-Lgqf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAF1UkEBCY-a17j1ZdCo5zlZPvZI1z0Bcbk This is a simple set of questions he asks that allow him to work out how much does he need to survive and by when. For example he might have to find 60k between now and next Friday or he’s gone. This clarity of thinking and purpose focuses the mind and crystallises the issue so you’re not dealing with any extraneous stuff. It demands a very simple focus on getting the money in the time you have or doing whatever it is that you need to do to survive.

Once you have worked out what you need to do to survive you need to communicate this in a calm and collected manner. Running around like a headless chicken and the building is on fire isn’t going to help anyone. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy advice of Don’t Panic is key here. Depending on the size of your team you may choose to tell everyone or simply only those that need to know or can help. If the latter is the case then you simply tell the people not directly involved that there is a crisis going on and that you and others will be dealing with it but the best thing they can do in the meantime is to carry on delivering fantastic work and products and delighting all your clients while it gets fixed. You need to get a balance between being open and honest enough not to start a mass panic and not being so guarded that rumours start flying. Be assured that, whatever you think,  people will notice that you’re in firefighting mode so you need to get ahead of it from an internal comms perspective.

 Once you have the plan and everyone knows what it is, it is a matter of just grinding it out until you have success and have fixed it. Sometimes it’s because you or one of your team took  their eye off the ball. Sometimes it’s because you were all growing super fast so existing safety checks and communication protocols no longer worked or broke down. Sometimes its just sheer bad luck. Whatever you do – don’t play the blame game! However tempting it might be to start finger pointing that isn’t going to solve anything. You should do a forensic analysis once it’s fixed to make sure you learn the lessons but now is not the time.

 Frequently it happens as a facet of your growth and success when you’re growing really quickly. Your product becomes more sophisticated, your marketing more polished, your sales comms more complex and if you’re not careful you eventually lose your way and your product is no longer doing the basics of what it was designed to do- fixing a problem or pain point that clients needed to have solved and were willing to pay for.

When this happens you go back to basics. As a founder it’s on you and you need to get in front of your clients face to face, identify and fix the problem, stop the over complexity and get back to where you started again.

It’s a certainty for any founder that this will happen- probably multiple times. So don’t panic and make sure you have a how not to die plan 😊