07/08/2026
A founder called me on a Thursday night. Commercial electrical company, about $5M a year, 20-some guys in the field. He built it himself over 15 years.
That afternoon, his biggest customer called. Worth over a million and a half a year, north of a quarter of his revenue. They got bought, the new owners brought in their own vendor, and he was out in 90 days.
I could hear it in his voice. That flat, far-away thing that happens when someone's doing math they really don't want to do.
Here's where it matters who's in your corner. In that moment, coaching usually does one of two things. Somebody opens a framework and walks him through a worksheet, or somebody goes soft and asks how it makes him feel. The guy's got two kids, a mortgage, and 20 families on his payroll. He doesn't need a worksheet or a feelings check. He needs to know what to do in the next 72 hours.
So I didn't reach for a framework. I reached for the time it happened to me, when I sat in the CEO seat of a frozen dessert chain and same-store sales fell off a cliff.
Here's what we did. We didn't touch the team that night. When you're panicked, every instinct says cut somebody, make a big move so you feel in control. That's the move that bleeds you out. Instead we built a list of every customer who'd left him in the last three years on halfway decent terms. Eleven of them. He'd call all eleven personally that week. Not to sell. Just to reconnect. Old relationships are the fastest revenue there is.
Then we mapped his real cash runway. Not the horror movie in his head. The number on the spreadsheet. Turned out he had seven months, not the six weeks his gut was screaming. That one fact changed every decision after it.
Two quarters later he'd replaced about 80% of that revenue. Three of the eleven came back on their own. He kept every single guy on his crew. He never made the panic cut.
None of it came out of a book. It came from having my own hands on the wheel when the road got bad.
