The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #74
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Perfection for Entrepreneurs: Lessons from Saint-Exupéry
- Shared Crisis Lessons from Zermatt, a Village Cut Off over Easter
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Perfection for Entrepreneurs: Lessons from Saint-Exupéry
Perfection for entrepreneurs means simplification, not more work. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wisdom shows how less can truly be more.
Perfection or pragmatism? As an entrepreneur, my immediate answer is always pragmatism.
It’s better to have a good solution in time than a perfect solution too late.
There is never enough time to get everything done you want.
We can’t comply with all the regulations or requirements promptly, so we will have to cut a few corners.
That’s what pragmatism looks like at Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded. But what about perfection?
It’s All About The Definition
Perfection is a word that is often defined implicitly. Most people interpret perfection as needing to do more work, add more features to their software, or write more legislation.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry defined perfection in a much better way in his book Terre des Hommes:
“Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.”
How much this resonates with my daily struggle as an entrepreneur. What can an entrepreneur do to move towards perfection, the Saint-Exupéry way?
In almost all cases, it means removing overdetermination in all aspects of a business.
Let’s look into some examples.
Streamline Your Product
Whenever we encounter problems with our software product, it is usually not because a feature is missing, but because features are too complex.
The more complex a feature is, the harder it is to test. It’s also difficult to explain to customers how that feature works. As a consequence, your customers will often scream that there are bugs when in fact the problems are down to complexity and configurability.
Let me give you an example. We recently cleaned up the application permissions in our software. Historically, there were 60 application permissions, allowing very individual configurations for access to different functionalities of our application. Misconfigurations by customers were so frequent that we decided to harmonize those 60 application permissions into just 10 permissions.
Looking at this mathematically, we reduced complexity by astronomical dimensions:
60 application permissions allow 60! = 8 x 10E81 possible configurations.
10 application permissions allow 10! = 4 x 10E6 possible configurations.
Therefore, we reduced complexity by a factor of 10E75. That’s a huge step towards Saint-Exupéry perfection.
Streamline Your Requirements
It’s the same on the business side. When we answer RFPs, we often see hundreds of non-functional requirements. Just like with application permissions in a software product, those non-functional requirements often contradict each other.
In some cases, those contradicting non-functional requirements lead to ugly discussions with the customer down the line. We even had a customer falsifying our RFP responses during the onboarding phase when they realized that some of the requirements contradicted each other.
Let’s reverse the perspective. We’re not just a supplier, we’re also a buyer. For example, we procure a whole range of software tools we need for our daily business. Whenever we evaluate a new tool, I constantly remind my team that we’re not that special, and we can very well live with the standard feature sets of Hubspot, JIRA, or Microsoft 365. Because the rest of the world can, too.
Streamline Your Internal Processes
This one is my favorite. Streamlining your internal processes is entirely in your control as an entrepreneur, and you can save big when getting this right.
Every time a colleague leaves us, we diligently think whether it is necessary to replace that person. Very often, inefficiencies are created by people who set up complicated processes. When they leave, it’s better to move your processes one step towards Saint-Exupéry perfection than replace the person who set up the complicated processes and allow the new colleague to further complicate processes.
Here is another example. I recently cleaned up all the JIRA tickets from the very early days of our company. Thousands of tickets described how we built the very first version of our software product. Most of them were ill-formulated and cluttered with countless labels. Deleting most of those old tickets didn’t just clean up JIRA, but triggered a discussion about making our bug ticket handling process more efficient.
Conclusion
Perfection in entrepreneurship is about doing more with less. And if you have to do more with less, there is no way around simplification and removing superfluous things.
If only lawyers would behave like entrepreneurs.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Shared Crisis Lessons from Zermatt, a Village Cut Off over Easter
Shared crisis lessons for homeowners, local leaders, and entrepreneurs from the Zermatt blackout over Easter and how to apply it next time.
Over the Easter weekend 2025, unusually heavy snowfall in Zermatt blocked roads and trains, caused trees to collapse onto power lines, and cut the village off from civilization for three days. No electricity, no fresh supplies.
I was in Zermatt at that time. Alone with two of my kids.
It was a great lessons-learned moment for the kids, helping them to realize how little gets done when electricity fades.
There weren’t just learnings for the kids, but also for the local authorities of Zermatt — even though they are used to power cuts, avalanches, and floods. How come I know? One of my military comrades organized a lessons-learned Zoom session with the local authorities of Zermatt and shared the screen recording. The chief of staff of the communal crisis team is also a military guy, hence the connection. That’s how Switzerland learns and works — we call it the active reserve system.
For a long time, I have prepared my home for emergencies, and I have been laughed at for my armageddon fantasies many times. Looking at the real-life learnings from Zermatt’s local authorities, I feel somewhat rehabilitated.
Furthermore, the learnings from Zermatt are valuable for any entrepreneur. Remember Zermatt generates most of its revenue from tourism, and most hotel operators are local entrepreneurs.
So let’s look into the most important lessons.
Electricity: Grid vs. Island Operation
Switzerland prepared for a possible shortage in the winter of 2022/2023 due to the war in Ukraine. As Zermatt has its own (small) hydro power plant, the village set up an island operation system during that time. Island operation allows for the consumption of self-produced electricity even if the grid is down.
However, not all consumers can be served during off-grid times, so you need a concept for prioritization.
Over the Easter weekend in 2025, the island operation worked well in Zermatt, but there were still some discussions about prioritization: It was decided to prioritize the hotels over the private households, to ease the pressure on the tourists who are not familiar with local circumstances. At the same time, some hotels still heated their infinity pools whilst their neighbors had no electricity at all.
Degradation needs to be graceful in times of crisis, or you risk blowing up even your backup island operation. That’s why preparing a concept for prioritization is a good idea.
Communication Backups
Listening to the local authorities of Zermatt, the hardest part was to mobilize the staff after the blackout hit at 01:30 am. Communications were knocked out, too, so how could they inform their employees to report to the crisis management situation room?
Even after the employees were finally reached (mostly through word-of-mouth and I-know-somebody-who-knows-somebody), communications remained an issue throughout the crisis. The mobile network was back after one day thanks to the island operation, but the internet was gone for almost three days. And without internet, access to documents stored on cloud systems was impossible. It was also impossible to inform tourists and the population about situation updates online; the only source of information was posters at some defined emergency contact points.
After the crisis, the communal authorities contemplate procuring some Starlink systems to avoid a total internet outage in the future.
Support Staff Pools
Even with backup systems in place for electricity and communication, the weakest link was the people: After 2 days of non-stop operation, the staff were exhausted. Because Zermatt was still completely cut off from the rest of the world, no relief personnel could be dispatched to the village.
As a learning from the crisis, the communal authorities plan to set up a support staff pool from the local population for future crises.
Conclusion
Crisis preparation pays off, no matter if you are a homeowner, a member of the local authorities, or an entrepreneur.
And as every crisis is different, it’s impossible to prepare for every aspect of the next crisis. That’s where after-action reviews come in.
And just like in the case of Zermatt, if you have learned something, share it with others so that they can learn, too. No matter what crisis, we’re stronger together than alone.
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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