A business owner describes how a severe crisis forced her to shut down and confront a lack of resources. The experience stripped away non-essentials and revealed core values: integrity, truthfulness, and clear purpose. Extreme pressure clarified what mattered most for survival.
So we, we close everything down. Okay, we've survived that step, but now we have no ice cream. It's May. We just came out of winter. We also have no money and we can't open our kitchen because we have to figure out where this is coming from. And then that's the clock starts ticking.
What did that crisis force you to do that you may have never done otherwise? When you're building your team for crisis, by the way, right?
So you, you think you have all these values, you think you have all these things in place. You don't really know those are your values until you've been tested and you've walked through fire. And then you get to the other side and you can say, we do have integrity. We are telling the truth. The other thing about when you're in the middle of crisis, deep crisis, is that it's actually like kind of cool because the only thing that matters is the most important things. The day before, everybody had their own idea of like what was important. And then the next day, None of it matters. The only thing that matters is survival. You know who you are. Who do we serve? What do we have to do? What is essential? What if we didn't do this, what would make us not Jennys anymore?
