The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #69
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- How To Stay Professional When Dealing With Assholes In Business
- A Prominent Reason for Project Failure: The Kickoff Meeting
- How Our Flawed Brains Prevent Proactive Crisis Management
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
How To Stay Professional When Dealing With Assholes In Business
Every founder meets them—abusive clients, toxic partners. Here’s how to deal with assholes in business without becoming one yourself.
If you want to be successful in business, you have to get on well with people. Customers, employees, and partners will run away from you if you treat them badly.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to be best friends with everyone. It’s OK to find personal friends by doing business, but finding personal friends is not the main purpose of doing business.
The main purpose of doing business is to create value for your customers and to do so profitably. And here is the crux: Sometimes, your interests do not align with the interests of your customers. They might see less value in your product than you need to charge them. Or they need a special feature for them to create value that you cannot build and operate profitably because not all your customers want that feature.
Such discussions can turn ugly, especially when dealing with large organizations that might not always be fully transparent about their true intentions due to internal politics.
Ugly discussions aren’t a problem per se, they are part of the game. In all those years as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I was involved in many of those ugly discussions. And I was able to conclude most of those discussions with mutual respect, even when we agreed to disagree.
But as for any rule, there are a few exceptions.
If you are mistreated…
Being mistreated is a harsh expression. Besides many strange episodes, our team has been mistreated very rarely in all these years.
There was a customer project manager who terrorized the entire team with WhatsApp messages late on Friday evenings, making false claims about us not delivering what we promised. It turned out that the problems were down to Boeing who delivered erroneous data. A few days later, a worldwide service warning was issued by Boeing to warn all their customers of the erroneous data. A few months later, that project manager suddenly had a new assignment.
One of my co-founders misbehaved in such a way that I had to fire him, only to make accusations against the company in the aftermath. Once the accusations were settled and we bought back his shares, I have never again heard from him.
There was another customer who falsified our RFP answers after going live, as he missed a feature we transparently said we didn’t offer during the RFP. Instead, the customer chose to blame us for things we never said we could fulfill. He blocked internal escalation of this matter, so we ended up writing to the Group CEO of a large airline to clarify the issue. Only to find out that falsifying RFP answers was covered up to the very top. So we ended up parting ways with that customer.
And there was another customer who made the highest demands but didn’t pay a single invoice on time. After the third overdue payment reminder, we suspended the service and ultimately ended the contract.
… don’t mistreat back
I’m not known to be a very emotional person. But people who know me will confirm that I don’t shy away from a firm response if it is needed.
However, always keep your professionalism when responding to somebody who mistreats you. Never go down to the same low level as they do. On the other side, not responding firmly would just reaffirm to the mistreaters that their behavior is ok.
Besides keeping your professionalism, you have to learn to get over mistreaters quickly. It’s just not worth thinking and talking about them. Clean up the mess, make the best out of it, and move on.
Conclusion
The above list of people who mistreated our team is exhaustive. If you think of all the customers, partners, and employees we have dealt with over the years, the mistreaters are a very tiny minority. They are not worth your time.
What can you learn from those episodes?
When talking to prospective customers, try to find out if you just met an expensive customer. An expensive customer doesn’t want to pay anything but wants everything. If you end up talking to an expensive prospective customer, dare to walk away from the conversation.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
A Prominent Reason for Project Failure: The Kickoff Meeting
Rushing a project kickoff can be a reason for project failure. Use the OODA loop methodology to steer projects to success.
Have you ever been involved in project work? I’m sure you have if you are working in an organization. And most probably, you have been involved in project work even if you are a solopreneur.
And when do projects go wrong? When the dashboards suddenly turn from green to red — apparently out of nowhere.
Quite often, the root cause of project dashboards suddenly turning red is at the very beginning of a project, namely in the kickoff meeting.
You might ask: how come? The kickoff meeting intends to align all stakeholders in a project. That’s true, and there is nothing wrong with doing a kickoff meeting. In most projects, the timing of the kickoff meeting is the problem.
The OODA Loop
The OODA loop is a decision-making model originally developed in the military but can be used for any problem.
It’s an acronym for observation — orientation — decision — action.
And you can see already now that acting stands only at position 4. You will have to observe, orient, and decide before you act.
Jumping to Conclusions
The whole point of the OODA loop is to avoid jumping to conclusions. Let’s go through the four steps of the OODA loop, focusing on how they work in a project setting.
1. Observation
In this step, you observe that there is a problem in your organization that needs resolution. Based on the nature of the problem, you decide that you will initiate a project.
Don’t jump to conclusions now. Initiating a project is not the same thing as holding a project kickoff meeting.
2. Orientation
This step is arguably the most important in the OODA loop. It’s about making sense of the isolated problem in a wider context.
Is the project the right framework for the problem, or are we rather talking about a program? What organizational requirements come along with the project, are there formal requests to prepare? Do we have a project budget, or do we need to apply for one first? If we don’t have a project budget, do we know the estimated cost of the project? If not, would it make sense to start a preliminary project first to find out more?
There are many more questions to be answered in the orientation phase. If you schedule a project kickoff meeting before you have all those answers, you can already imagine how your project dashboard will turn red later on.
3. Decision
In this step, you compare the possible courses of action you developed in the previous step, weighing their advantages and disadvantages before making a decision. In this way, you can avoid running off in the wrong direction with good intentions, but ultimately missing the target.
And you know what missing the target means in a project setting: red project dashboards, delays, cost overruns.
4. Action
Once a decision has been taken, you can start acting or executing. Because a project always involves multiple people, you will need to give proper instructions and assignments to them. Otherwise, they cannot succeed in their assigned roles in the project.
This assignment happens at the project kickoff meeting. No earlier and no later.
Conclusion
It’s an old saying, but it’s very true:
If it’s urgent, take your time.
A casual saying compares project dashboards to watermelons:
Everything looks green until you dive deep into it. When you cut the watermelon, you discover that most of it is red and not green.
If you want to avoid watermelon project dashboards, take the time to follow the OODA loop steps described above before you kick off a project.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
How Our Flawed Brains Prevent Proactive Crisis Management
Most crisis responses are reactive. However, proactive crisis management can build resilience before the next big disruption hits.
Since the existence of humankind, crises have come and gone: Volcanoes, wars, pandemics.
In entrepreneurship, crises are omnipresent, too. A key employee leaves. A large customer doesn’t renew the contract. A lawsuit ties up management resources and liquidity.
Reactive Crisis Management
A leader’s core trait is managing crises if and when they occur. As crises often occur out of nothing, crisis management is inherently reactive.
An aircraft crash is the prototype of a crisis used in many crisis management trainings. The crisis organization of an airline is dormant most of the time, only to be activated in the event of a crash. Once activated, the crisis response team reacts to the crash, doing whatever is needed to take care of the victims and their relatives and to clean up the mess. As soon as the crisis event is handled, the end of the crisis is declared and everybody on the crisis response team goes back to their daily business.
Even for larger crises, it’s the same. Remember the COVID-19 pandemic, when entire countries went into lockdown? Governments and companies fielded crisis response teams, only to dissolve them once the lockdowns were over.
After most major wars, people are so fed up with war that they disarm. The best example is the almost complete disarmament of Europe between 1990 and 2022. People were done and over with WWII and the following Cold War.
Most humans don’t like crises. Whenever a crisis is over, they sigh in relief and try to forget the crisis as quickly as they can.
Proactive Crisis Management
Let’s try to look at crisis management from a proactive perspective. You don’t need to be a prepper to realize that many things can go wrong in our highly interconnected world.
Speaking for myself, I started to make my house energy self-sufficient more than 10 years ago. My friends said that I had power anxiety, and they wouldn’t understand why I invested time and money into solar panels, house batteries, and a building control system.
Then came winter 2022/2023. Russian gas deliveries to Western Europe came to a halt. Power dams were empty after a dry summer. And French nuclear power stations were down due to maintenance.
Many of my friends who laughed about my self-sufficient house called me. “Tom, what do I need to do now to install rooftop solar?” I told them that they wouldn’t have to do anything now, as they wouldn’t get any solar panels before at least the next summer.
As the requests for information about my self-sufficient house were so frequent, I compiled my thoughts and learnings in an eBook.
I also spent some time thinking about the best possible outcome of the energy crisis of 2022/2023: What if, in contrast to COVID-19, there would be some real change in behavior and politics after this crisis?
I put my thoughts into an article named “A Fictitious Review of the 2022 Energy Crisis, Seen From 2025”. Now it’s 2025, and what has stayed behind from the energy crisis in 2022?
Absolutely nothing.
The Anatomy of the Human Brain
Forgetting is an integral part of our survival: If we weren’t able to forget, we could not focus on what is relevant for survival, and as a consequence, we would die one way or the other.
Forgetting is great for everyday survival, but the chances for the long-term survival of our species would be better if we wouldn’t forget each crisis as soon as it is over.
But maybe it’s our own imperfections that make humankind so attractive if compared to a machine.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about my experience in entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
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