How to survive the 2025 business crisis (before it's too late)

So I'm recording this early April 2025. You know, I'm coming on 25 years doing stuff in business. I've lived through a couple of recessions, 2020, arguably 2001 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Great Recession 2008. And in each of those downturns and disruptions and upheavals, you know, we went through kind of what we're going through right now, which is people trying to understand what the new reality is. And this early 2025 is probably the most uncertain I've seen business and business conditions since, well, 2020, right? The pandemic looked like it was going to shut down basically all of our economies and grind the whole thing to a halt. Having spent 25 years kind of surviving, hopefully, all of these downturns, including this one and these periods of uncertainty, I've seen some patterns in terms of what's worked to be basically resilient and how to make sure you as a business person are able to get through these things from a financial standpoint for your business. So that's what this video is about. I'll tell a couple stories of folks that I've seen survive them and folks going through it right now, and then I'll share a framework that I use to survive these kind of situations. Knock on wood, it's worked so far. So stay tuned. My dermatologist yelled at me because I was getting too much sun on my neck. So I have to wear this neck cover when I go for walks now. So that's that. It's not just some stick. So I look visually different on the camera, which is what some people who create social media stuff do. Put stuff on their nose. I don't do that stuff. I'm funny enough looking as is. But yeah, I'm a business nerd. I love sharing stuff that I've learned over the decades that I've been in business. If you want to get some of that wisdom and if you're interested in learning more about how you can do well in your journey to own companies or companies, stay tuned. Give me a subscribe and a comment. So arguably the group or businesses that are being most affected by what's going on right now with the tariffs are the e-commerce sellers. So these are people that import stuff almost exclusively from China because it's the world's factory now, and then they sell it to American consumers via one of the platforms. Usually it's Amazon, but oftentimes it's other platforms. If you're looking for a business that is most threatened by what's going on with, at the current time of recording here, like 140% effective tariffs on Chinese goods, the folks that are running these businesses are super affected. So one, like My friend Michael Petrone, who's on Twitter here and on different social networks, is one who's precisely in this spot. He has a business that imports basically a bunch of different products and niches that he's found inside of Amazon being an opportunity and gets them from China. He's done that for a decade plus and done and been very successful with the whole thing. But certain things he brings in like power tools and that sort of thing, those sort of things aren't going to magically be picked up and manufactured in the United States. Like there is such a huge ecosystem in China producing these things. Like he realistically, when shipments start showing up, are going to have to double or triple his prices that he's selling on Amazon in order to keep moving those things. And you can see where this goes. It creates a huge problem for him because he's not sure if there's a market for a $300 entry-level drill. We don't know. There's a market for a high-end version of that. It sells at Home Depot or some of the big box stores under some of the brands you've seen. But for his type of stuff, which isn't big and branded, he's not sure if he's still going to have a business. And similarly with these new rules as they've come out from the White House and the tariffs and all that kind of stuff, he's not quite sure if he's going to be competing under a level playing field with the Chinese as the stuff comes in as well. There are a lot of Chinese importers and exporters who are on the Amazon platform who basically figure out ways to cheat so they don't have to pay taxes or tariffs at all. It creates a situation where somebody like Michael or some of the other importers on Amazon are structurally just set up so they can't compete with these Chinese because the Chinese, well, they get to play by different rules. So what does somebody like Michael do? Well, the first thing, which doesn't help him today, but the first thing you have to think about is that your preparation for black swan events or downturn events like this has to be done way ahead of time. You have to start preparing yourself for a day like today where, you know, it may be a rainy day. And that preparation is all around this idea of creating a level of resilience in your business. And ultimately what causes businesses to fail, it's running out of money. And resilience is you having the opportunity to weather kind of times in which money goes out the door faster than it comes in. And so that leads into this framework that's worked for me because ultimately when I've owned a business, my goal has been how do I have everything possible set for myself that it's very unlikely that we wouldn't be able to survive survive a black swan or a downturn event, kind of like what's going on right now with these e-commerce guys. That's the solution I propose for folks, and it's worked for myself, and I call it the ABCD plan. And it's basically, you always have what you're doing. That's kind of your first option. You're running your business, it's profitable. But if things go bad or things start to go wrong for your business, you start to have a bad month or a bad quarter, or you get unlucky like what's going on now with all this tariff stuff, you have a Plan A, which is how do I fall back and do that? And then what you want to have is if you exhaust the entirety of Plan A, which is a way to survive these downturns, then you need to have a Plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D. This is best explained kind of in practice. So let's imagine you're one of these e-commerce sellers. Your Plan A to survive kind of a downturn, your first option is hopefully you've built up some savings, right? You have some cash in the bank that you're able to leverage and put into the company, and maybe you got to bridge operations and put a little bit of cash to keep the thing going while hopefully all this blows over. And then Plan B may be to say, okay, well, if my savings run out of money I've saved kind of in my rainy day fund, my Plan A, I have a Plan B, which is maybe I've built up equity in my my home and I can go tap a home equity line of credit in that situation and have more capital available to kind of weather the storm as well. Because remember, like storms like this fundamentally kill businesses because you start to bleed cash, right? You're not making cash like you were before. So what we're doing in this format of this Plan A, B, C, and D is just having multiple successive resources that you can go tap into and keep your business alive and be ready to fight for another day. And to keep kind of game planning this out, Plan C might be you have a bank line of credit that would be available to you that you've set up where the bank has agreed to make a certain amount of money available available to you, you know, and that line of credit is just sitting there. You can go grab that money if you need to. And Plan D might be going to a relative that you've talked to about this kind of situation, which you say, hey, like, here's my plan never to have to call you, but in an emergency, like, I may have to reach out to you and I might ask for a loan or some help to get you through it. And then this can keep going on and on. At each step, what you do is you have a successive set of resources that you've built up before the rainy day starts that you can go rely on to keep your business going and keep it alive while kind of the bad stuff passes over. And look, I've had to leverage kind of this Plan A, B, C, and D framework myself. I've had years in which things were so bad that I had to write checks into companies to keep them going. And I knew that company would be worth something someday. I knew it would be making money, but it's a situation where it's like, well, this is going to be one of those bad years. You know, the farmers talk about it as feast or famine years, kind of same thing. Some years you get good weather, some years it doesn't rain and you don't get to harvest anything. There's a bunch of other stuff that you do to weather kind of downturns like this. But this framework is what you do to be ready for the downturns and to make them so hopefully they don't kill you. Because ultimately that's what success is in business is living to fight another day. I've seen it too many times where somebody only had a Plan A, they didn't have a Plan B or a Plan C, and some bad luck came along and it killed their hopes and dreams and everything they'd worked for for decades or longer. To me, that's pretty freaking sad. Anyway, thanks for being here. Let me know what you think of the video in the comments below, and I'll see you next time.