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The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #73

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Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• How Inefficient Problems Drain Your Organization
• Crisis Preparation in 2025: One Apocalypse Isn’t Enough
• 24 Years, 1,200 Days: Inside Switzerland’s Active Reserve System

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

How Inefficient Problems Drain Your Organization

Why do things rarely work the first time? Learn how inefficient problems arise and what leaders can do to turn them into efficient ones.

Why can’t you get it right on the first attempt?

Why does it take so long to get this fixed?

I’m sure you have been confronted with such questions, irrespective of the role and industry you’re active in. Sometimes, I hear these questions from our customers, and sometimes I hear them from my team.

It’s one of leadership’s primary tasks to remove friction and frustration. Frictions and frustrations are inefficient, and you don’t make money when you waste your time on inefficiencies.​

And there we have it. Inefficient. That’s the root cause why stuff can’t be done quickly, or things don’t work on the first attempt. Inefficiencies cannot just be found in processes, but also in problems.

Let’s look at efficient and inefficient problems, and what you can do to get out of the trap.

Efficient Problems

An efficient problem is a problem that can be solved without any ambiguity.

For simple problems, this is easy: If your kids spill their milk glasses onto the floor, mop up the floor. If you see somebody with an open wound, apply a bandage. If a user can’t access a certain functionality in your software, assign the correct permissions.

In most organizations, there aren’t just simple problems, but also complicated problems: All the tasks that need to be executed when a new employee joins the company. All the tasks that need to be completed to close the annual accounts. Such problems can still be solved efficiently with proper processes, checklists, and work instructions. However, solutions for complicated problems must be documented completely free of ambiguity.

Inefficient Problems

As soon as there is ambiguity in a problem, it becomes an inefficient problem. Not all your team members have the same understanding of what it means to onboard a new colleague. Not all your customers expect a new feature in your software to work the same way. Office politics get in the way of a permanent improvement of the situation.

Inefficient problems frustrate everybody. They suck out energy, time and passion from most people — except for those few strange people who enjoy nurturing problems for their personal or political gain.

Very often, inefficient problems take 80% of your energy and time, and they solve only 20% of the overall pain.

Ways Out of The Trap

How can we get out of the trap? Start with yourself, and with your own organization.

If you solve all the efficient problems first, you will already have 80% of the overall problem pain solved. So start with solving the efficient problems before turning to the inefficient problems.

When you start touching the inefficient problems, try to make them efficient. It’s an old saying that only simple plans work in reality. A solution to a problem is simple enough only when you can explain it in three sentences to a five-year-old kid. Now think of your own organization. How many overly complicated processes are there in your organization? Try to simplify processes wherever possible, and you will see that some inefficient problems suddenly turn into efficient problems.

The same is true for software. At Yonder, a B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we started to simplify features to remove ambiguity: There is nothing worse than a bug report straight after release of a new feature, because some customers expected the feature to work differently than you designed it. If you can’t simplify your features, make them user-configurable so that each user can control the behavior for themselves.

So much for the easy part. The nastier root cause of inefficient problems is toxic people who nurture problems. There is no way around getting rid of toxic people if you want to solve all inefficient problems, irrespective of whether those toxic people are your team members or your customers.

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CRISIS MANAGEMENT FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Crisis Preparation in 2025: One Apocalypse Isn’t Enough

Whether you’re running a business or a household, crisis preparation in 2025 means your backups and bunkers better be ready – and tested.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the term “invest in preparedness, not in prediction” in his famous book, The Black Swan.

This book was first published in 2007, a time when crises were rare and black swans were even rarer.

Fast-forward to 2025. War is raging in Europe and the Middle East. Climate change is more visible than ever. Donald Trump and his erratic policies are back in the White House.

Black Swans? There are way too many crises in today’s world for Black Swans to be a suitable animal analogy. We should rather use ravens to describe today’s constant crises: There are many more ravens than black swans, and ravens operate in flocks rather than in isolation.

Prepare Before The Shit Hits The Fan

Flashing back to the 1990s. When I was a teen, I often made fun of my mum and her spleen for canned foods. “Mum, war is over.” She was still maintaining food stocks the way she learned it during the Cold War.

Flashing forward to the 2010s. I started investing in photovoltaics, a storage furnace, an emergency power unit, and a rainwater storage tank. Now it was other people making fun of me, accusing me of being a prepper and having Armageddon fantasies.

Preparing my home took me some 10 years. Once my house was ready, I started preparing for IT disasters: Backup satellite internet connection, redundant servers at Yonder, the B2B company I co-founded, and offline data backups. Laugh at me if you want, but data integrity is just as important as energy self-sufficiency in our connected world.

Maintain Your Preparations

Preparing for disaster is one thing; maintaining your preparations is another.

Do you run regular emergency power unit tests? I do. Once a quarter, I switch off grid power to check if the failover to the emergency power unit works fine. And believe it or not, at least once a year, something doesn’t work the way it should. If you run tests regularly, you have plenty of time to fix things before adversity strikes.

The same applies to power generators: It’s not enough to buy a power generator after you were trapped in a 36-hour blackout. If you have the generator sitting in your basement and waiting several years for the next blackout, chances are it won’t work at the moment of truth. You need to take it out regularly and run it up to make sure the cylinders are well-oiled.

At Yonder, we continuously back up all customer data. But backing up data is just half the story. How about restoring data from backups? Have you ever practiced this? We restore data from our backups every week when we reset the demo environment our sales team uses. Even if this takes time and effort, you don’t want to be caught off guard when you have to restore real customer data and you haven’t exercised the procedure before.

Conclusions

There would be many more examples, but the message should be clear by now. Crisis preparation is a long-term endeavor, but preparation is not enough.

You will need to invest repeated time and effort to maintain your preparations, or you will be surprised that they don’t work at the worst possible moment.

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INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

24 Years, 1,200 Days: Inside Switzerland’s Active Reserve System

Security doesn’t come for free. In Switzerland’s active reserve system, everyone must contribute. For me, that’s a 20% side job since 2001.

A very long time ago, Switzerland chose to organize its society using a principle we call the active reserve system. This system remains the cornerstone of our society today — in security, politics, education, and associations.

As unique as the active reserve system is, its benefits and challenges are unique. In a previous article, I explained the benefits of the active reserve system; this article focuses more on the challenges.

Let’s start with a quick recap of the benefits before we dive into the challenges.

Benefits

From a strategic perspective, the active reserve system has three closely interconnected benefits.

First, not having a standing army and not having a standing parliament is highly efficient: There aren’t any professional soldiers and politicians to pay constantly. Soldiers are called up in times of crisis or war, they serve as long as needed, and are sent home again when their mission is accomplished. Likewise, politicians gather for parliamentary sessions four times a year, only to pursue their original professions in between parliamentary sessions.

Second, because soldiers and politicians are ordinary citizens, there is no detached caste of people who control the state. Every citizen can serve in the Armed Forces. Every citizen can be elected into political office.

And third, power is dispersed, with no individual amassing too much power. You can’t be a member of parliament and an army general at the same time. But you can be an army general first, and serve in parliament after quitting the Armed Forces. Or vice-versa. But for lower-level functions, it’s possible to serve in the Armed Forces and on the local school council at the same time: If that weren’t possible, we wouldn’t have enough people to fill all those active reserve jobs in security, politics, education, and associations.

Challenges

Let’s look at the challenges of the active reserve system now. I am doing this with a perspective of serving as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces for 24 years. In those 24 years, I have spent roughly 1’200 days in the military.

That’s 50 days per year, or one day per week.

For 24 straight years.

That’s like an additional 20% part-time job on top of your full-time job. Tasks don’t auto-complete during your absence from work, and when you get home after a tiring week of military duty, your family wants to catch up for the time you missed.

Challenges for Employers

At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, I am not the only active reserve officer. I like hiring military guys for their attitude. As a downside, they are on military duty regularly. That’s like an additional 3–4 weeks of annual leave when the employee is not reachable and not doing work for our company.

The social security system reimburses companies for military absences, but no way near the actual salary costs of an average IT guy. Therefore, companies pay a significant part of the costs for national security.

Much worse than paying parts of the costs is the absence of a knowledgeable resource. Especially in small and mid-sized companies, a 3–4 week absence of a specialist can delay projects and therefore revenues. Even if the knowledge can be covered by some team colleagues, imagine shifting the tasks of a full-time position to three other colleagues who already work full-time.

Challenges for Families

In contrast to regular work, military duty happens 24/7. In most cases, it happens far away from your home. And of course, home office and remote military duty are not possible. To finish off the adversities, you cannot choose when you’re unit is scheduled for its service, you get summoned.

If you’re unlucky, you will be on military service on your kids’ birthdays, on the first day of school, during the theater performance at school, or even during the summer holidays or over Christmas.

And when you finally get home on weekends, you can’t play cards with your kids all weekend long. You’re tired, and you need to catch up on urgent work that was left behind during your absence.

These are the challenges encountered in regular military training courses. When you get called up for a real crisis or even a war, things get worse. You can’t go home every weekend. Your service will be longer than three or four weeks. You might get hurt or even killed.

I know what I am talking about. I was called up for 8 straight weeks during COVID-19, leaving behind three young kids and a wife in homeschooling during a lockdown. I have witnessed several deadly accidents in my time as the commander of an airlift company, losing close comrades and picking up dead strangers. This all leaves traces that don’t go unnoticed with your kids. Years after a deadly helicopter crash, we passed the place where a dear comrade died in an accident. Suddenly, my youngest son said, “Dad, isn’t that where the helicopter crashed?”

Now imagine what it means for a parent to go to war. Luckily, I don’t know what war is all about, but I can extrapolate from my real-life military experiences described above.

Security Isn’t Free

With all those challenges, why is the active reserve system still an excellent system?

Besides the benefits shown above, it shows that security doesn’t come for free. Companies and citizens both must contribute their parts to a safe country. I’d rather have an additional 20% job for a quarter of a decade than live in an unsafe country.

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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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