Leading a business through crisis isn’t something you can fully prepare for. You can read every book, study every case study, and still find yourself making decisions at midnight with incomplete information and no good options in front of you.
January 2020: I became CEO of Steel City Pops — a gourmet popsicle company with locations across Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas. The company had navigated bankruptcy before I arrived. Two months after I walked in the door, COVID hit.
What followed was one of the most demanding, clarifying, and ultimately formative years of my leadership career. Here are five things leading a business through crisis actually taught me.
1. A Boondoggle Is More Valuable Than a Budget Meeting
A boondoggle — for those who haven’t heard the term — is an off-site team gathering. Part work, part culture-building, part “let’s actually talk to each other outside of Zoom.” Early in my tenure at Steel City Pops, we gathered the leadership team for one of these sessions. It wasn’t a luxury. It was a necessity.
When you’re leading a business through crisis, the instinct is to cut everything that doesn’t directly generate revenue. Gatherings, travel, culture work — all of it looks like waste when cash is tight. But the teams that survive crises intact are the ones that stayed connected as humans, not just as functional units trying to hit numbers. Don’t underestimate the ROI of your people actually knowing and trusting each other when everything else is on fire.
2. Cash Flow Clarity Is a Leadership Responsibility
In The Small Business Playbook, I write about navigating the financial fallout of running a business during COVID — reviewing cash flow and expenses line by line, every single week, with my CFO. At Steel City Pops, that discipline was the difference between staying open and closing permanently.
Leading a business through crisis means you cannot afford to be vague about your financial position. Revenue and cash are not the same thing. A business can be profitable on paper and dead in practice if it runs out of cash before the money arrives. The leader’s job is to know the numbers — not just review them quarterly, but understand them weekly at a minimum and use them to make real decisions in real time.
3. Your Team Will Take Their Cues From You
Crisis reveals leadership character faster than anything else. When revenue dropped, when locations closed, when the team was scared — they were watching how I responded. Not what I said in the all-hands meeting. How I actually showed up day to day.
In Lead With Empathy, I write that emotions are contagious. A leader who panics quietly spreads panic. A leader who communicates calmly and clearly — even when the news is hard — builds stability. Your team doesn’t need you to pretend everything is fine. They need you to be steady, honest, and present. That steadiness is itself a form of leadership, and it costs nothing except the discipline to manage your own anxiety before you walk into the room.
4. Decisions Have to Be Made With Incomplete Information
One of the hardest parts of leading a business through crisis is that you rarely have all the information you want before you have to act. You make the best call you can with what you have, learn from what happens, and adjust.
Closing our original Homewood location was one of the most emotional decisions I’ve ever made in a leadership role. It was the right call. But it wasn’t easy, and the data wasn’t perfectly clean. At some point in every crisis, the leader has to stop analyzing and start deciding. Paralysis dressed up as caution is still paralysis — and it has a cost.
5. Culture Is What Gets You Through — Not What You Build After
The teams that navigated COVID best weren’t the ones who started building culture in March 2020. They were the ones who had been building it for years before that. Culture is not a crisis response. It’s the thing that makes crisis survivable.
In Build Kickass Teams, I write that culture isn’t built by what you preach — it’s built by what you tolerate. That was never more true than during a pandemic. The behaviors you let slide, the standards you abandoned, the trust you built or failed to build — all of it showed up in how your team responded when things got hard.
If you’re leading a business through crisis right now, or you want to build something strong enough to survive the next one, start with the most common small business challenges that show up before crisis hits — or book a free fit call with Pete and let’s talk about where your business stands.