The Pandemic Made Personal Crisis Planning a Requirement

What happens to your business when you get taken out of commission?

Joe Procopio
Index

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Image: akinbostanci/Getty Images

I never really understood the depth of the old adage “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters” until the pandemic turned my personal and professional life upside down.

Take a second to ask yourself this question: What happens to your team, your company, and your livelihood when a personal crisis takes you out of commission? The more of a leader you are, the deeper your absence will be felt. If you’re at or near the top of your organization — and especially if your company is in its earlier stages, like a startup — there’s a good chance that if you go down, the business could go down with you.

So every good leader needs a personal crisis plan. Let’s talk about how to develop one.

It wasn’t 2020 that took me out — it was 2021

It was exactly one year ago in March 2020 when business stopped overnight. At my primary company, we initiated a deep-cutting fallback plan to begin riding it out. The startups I advise all immediately went into shutdown, with some of them better suited for that than others. My startup “projects” — ventures that hadn’t quite matriculated to revenue-generating…

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Joe Procopio
Index
Writer for

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com