Leading Through a Crisis

1:56  You can't avoid a crisis

2:16  Great leadership is the ability to take action

2:27  Play a game

2:49  Predict the unpredictable

2:57  Something will happen when you move

3:26  Self-doubt

4:09  Eddy's call-to-action

 

 

 

Hey everybody. This is Eddie over at Ignite Spot welcome to our very first Facebook Live video and I'm excited to do this with you today. We are talking about Leading Through a Crisis. What it means to be a leader during a really difficult time. Just to give you a sense of who we are, we help businesses and entrepreneurs become more wealthy through implementing better accounting practices and then we do strategic and financial coaching and that kind of stuff. We're not talking about accounting today, but instead we're talking about being a leader. 

When I started this company almost 12 years ago now. We did it during the housing crisis and it was a scary time and things were just falling apart and the world seemed like it was not going to pull through. I remember just people losing their jobs left and right and wondering how we're gonna get clients. It was just me at the time. Just being in the living room trying to run a little accounting firm since we've grown to a bigger accounting firm, we have experienced many crises over the years.

And now we're in another one. We are in a very big one that you're all aware of.  I've been watching some people excel in their leadership, and I've been watching others really struggle. I wanna share with you what I'm seeing as I'm meeting with entrepreneurs all over the country. The key phrase is this leading through a crisis, not leading in a crisis. I wanna talk about that and I don't wanna talk about leading around the crisis. Let's define that real quick. 

Leading in a crisis to me means that you are in it. You're scared of it. You're panicked and you are simply trying to exist within it. So your decisions are limited, and you are panicking because of it. When you try to lead around a crisis. That's what we all learn in business school. We're taught that if we can be better business planners, better strategic thinkers, we can miss the crisis completely. And we're going to be raking in the gold while other people are losing their shirts in the storm. But that's not the case. 

You cannot avoid a crisis. You are going to have a crisis in your family and your personal life and absolutely 100 percent in your business. There's nothing you can do about it. So you will, of course, be able to avoid some of those moments but more often than not you're gonna be hit with bad days, bad weeks or even bad years. So what do you do? 

Leading through a crisis to me means movement and great leadership is just that. It is the ability to move. It is the ability to do something versus just sitting at your desk and thinking. Play a game with me for just a minute. If you're having a tough time at work and your business is struggling, are you gonna be better off being the kind of leader that sits at your desk and creates a 50 page kind of analysis of the situation? Somebody that looks at every angle of the thing with Excel? Tries to figure it all out? Runs several budgets tries to predict the unpredictable? Or would you be better off by picking up the phone and calling a customer? Taking some action by actually doing something?

Something will happen when you move and you take action. That's what leading through a crisis is. 

I heard a great quote a few days ago about leadership, which is when things are going great and the money's pouring in and the employees are happy and you're feeling fit and strong and all that stuff, leadership is easy. Being a great leader is easy at that moment because everything is going really well. It's when things get hard that leadership becomes hard. Why is that? I think it's because we have self-doubt. 

If you put a bunch of people in the room. Let's say 50 people in a room. What you're gonna end up having is 50 different versions of insecurity. We are all full of insecurity and self-doubt, and that's why it's hard to lead when things go wrong. Because we start to ask questions like, Am I good enough? Am I capable of leading through this challenge? Will people even follow me? Will they hear my voice? Will they respect me? Do I look the part? Do I look old enough or do I look too young? You start having all of these questions about yourself and instead of actually taking that action and I'm leading through the crisis, you sit within it. You sit within yourself. Leading through a crisis. 

My call to all of you right now, is we're working with entrepreneurs is to stand up and take action. Whether it's picking up the phone and calling a customer, reaching out to your employees, moving into new verticals, trying new things re-purposing your products or services. But don't sit. Don't wait for it to be over. This is a chance for you to go out and literally take the crisis and turn it into something that you can use. 

We do lots of coaching for free. We don't charge for our services. We try to give as much information out as possible and we do that by having things like this. Where we talk about everything from growth tactics and strategies to financial metrics to how to measure the wealth of your business to how to improve accounting all that stuff. And in order to get that, it's really simple. All you've got to do is go to our website now. Our marketing team put together a really easy link for you. 

If you go to Bit.ly/freebusinesswebinars, no hyphens or spaces, or anything, just free business webinars, you will find access to all of the webinars that we do. We usually do one a month. In those webinars, we're talking about something specific. We'll do a deep-dive on a topic with a guest, and you can ask questions. We'd love to see you there.

We're doing a new webinar tomorrow! We're going to be talking about something similar to what we did today. It's How to Prepare Your Business for a Crisis. We're giving you seven things that you can do. There are seven action items to move through a crisis and get something done versus just sitting and freaking out.

Okay. Sneak preview: I'm going to give you one. This is not the most tricky one, but most people don't have this in place. That is to a line of credit. You need a line of credit. All that does is it buys you time to act when the crisis hits. Now the tip I will be giving tomorrow isn't just to get a line of credit. We're going to talk about how to do it. How much do you need? Who to go to? What terms should you be looking at? When you know you're getting a good deal? When you're not getting a good deal? Because there's so much to think about. That's just one of 7 things we'll be discussing tomorrow in an hour-long webinar.

Thanks for checking us out on Facebook live today. We're going to do this once a month, I'm not sure but stay with us. We appreciate you following us, and we'll see you guys around. Thank you.

Links to sources mentioned in the video:

Free Business Webinars: 7 Steps to Crisis-Proof Your Business

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