28 Jan 2026 · 5 min
Bill Gallagher uses Apollo 13 to show how business leaders should prepare for what could go wrong. He covers risk assessment, contingency planning, and empowering team members to surface problems before they become disasters.
Chapters
Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think DOCSA talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today, Mike Tyson says everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face. And you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to really talk about all the things that could go wrong for fear of being too negative and resist others talking about the things that might go wrong for, you know, casting a buzz or a bad hex or something on, on their plans. The thing is, we really want to consider this. Think about the Apollo 13 mission. Two days into the mission, 207,000 miles away from from Earth, a large bang is heard and they start having fluctuations with their electrical power and attitude control thrusters. And one of the astronauts, Jim Swigert, radios NASA okay, Houston, we have had a problem here. A small electrical short and oxygen tank had blown the thing impacting and blowing out oxygen tanks and fuel cells. So they now had an issue with oxygen and power. They had a real problem in their hands and immediately they needed to reconsider the like. The whole mission was off at this point. It was just really about getting home alive and but fortunately, among many things, but in an earlier training mission, they had encountered a situation where they needed to use their lunar module as a lifeboat. And in doing that scenario, the mission failed because they couldn't power that thing up and get into it in time. Thanks to that earlier probing and looking for possible points of failure, they had created a whole checklist and procedure for powering up the lunar module and the lifeboat and using it as a lifeboat. Thank God they'd done that because if they hadn't, Apollo 13 wouldn't be the extraordinary rescue success story that it was. So thanks to that, they were able to power up the lunar module. They used that as their lifeboat. There were a whole lot of other things. Watch the movie, read the book if you want to know more about the whole thing. But this idea, I think is really an important thing for all of us as business leaders and that is to probe deeply about the things that are most likely to go wrong and to deal with that. Create contingency plans around those. Don't avoid that. And if you have people on your team who always seem a bit negative and questioning what could go wrong, you just should thank those people and empower those people. That's not the only perspective, but it's really important because things will go wrong, like all kinds of things. Not necessarily the things you thought about, but having done a big broad reach of the things that are most likely to go wrong, you'll have a few contingencies to deal with as your project, as your mission unfolds. I hope that's helpful for you and gives you something to think about as you work on planning and ensuring the success of your plans. One of the critical things as you grow and accomplish things that you've never done before My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week. So if you dug it like it, subscribe to it, give a review on it, get notifications, share it with somebody else. All of that stuff's good for you and us, but come back and check out the next ones. We've got a whole series of these right now running on topics related to leadership that scales, so hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up until then. Bye bye. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. We With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com combilg that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.




