Like parenting, entrepreneurs can’t opt out of crises. Stay calm, always carry your tools, and fix problems wherever you are.
Life is ugly sometimes. Things happen at the worst possible moment, and bad things seem to happen simultaneously.
Some people call it Murphy’s Law.
Parents know this happens now and then, and they deal with the problems when they occur. Just think of an injured kid that needs medical care ten minutes before you need to leave for an important meeting.
Entrepreneurs should know that shit happens now and then, too. But from my own experience, many entrepreneurs get surprisingly agitated when the shit hits the fan, and are surprisingly unprepared for such situations.
Let’s look at three strategies for coping with life’s unpleasantries.
1. Always Be On-Call
At Yonder, the B2B company I co-founded, we have an on-call team to handle issues and urgencies with our server infrastructure 24/7. This team operates on a roster and is compensated for their stand-by and intervention duty.
But sometimes, interventions go beyond keeping the server infrastructure alive. We recently had to recover data on our production system. This didn’t just involve a large part of our technical team, but also our customer team: Somebody had to maintain the communication with our customers until the issue was fixed.
Where was I when this serious incident happened? I was attending an event on aircraft accident investigation halfway across the country. Did our customers or our team care where I was? Of course not. As an entrepreneur, you’re always on duty, just like a parent.
2. Always Carry Your Laptop
Because I’m always on duty, I always carry my laptop with me. Actually, not just my laptop, but my entire office. Over all those years of working remotely, I have learned how to pack all my office tools into a 10kg backpack.
Does this mean that I’m always working? Not at all! But I am ready to step in if my attendance is needed, wherever I am. During my holidays, when I’m attending a family gathering, or when I’m visiting friends.
Is this stressful? Not at all! It’s like with kids. You know that they might have an accident and you need to run to the doctor with them at short notice, but you also know that this doesn’t happen every day. So stay calm, my fellow entrepreneurs.
3. Be Proactive with Your Plannable Work
Now you might think, “How does this guy get his work done if he is always on stand-by to step in for issues and urgencies?”
Well, I’m not sitting idle waiting for something urgent to pop up. I work on other stuff: plannable work, thinking, admin tasks, and technical concepts. None of this is urgent — unless you set them aside and start working on them only five minutes before their deadlines. For this, I have developed a system to proactively work on “block” and “admin” tasks, maintaining my capacity for short-notice issues and urgencies.
This system also helps me stay productive when my schedule turns upside down at short notice. No matter if a prospect cancels the call at short notice, you miss your train, or a meeting is cancelled because somebody is sick, one view into my “block” and “admin” task list is enough to fill the gap with productive work. And besides getting a non-urgent task off your plate, you’re creating capacity to attend to an urgency if needed.
Conclusion
Just like parents can’t complain all the time, complaining isn’t an option for entrepreneurs. Just like with kids, get used to the unpredictability of emergencies and the need to step in on short notice.
Not convinced yet? Then I strongly advise you to stay clear of entrepreneurship. There are many well-paid jobs in public-sector administration, for example.
