MBA1994 How to Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred dollar MBA show. Fresh business goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn how to never let a crisis go to waste. I know that sounds a little bit strange and no one's telling you to bring on problems or to welcome a crisis. But business is volatile. It's up, it's down and you will have hard times ahead if you haven't experienced them already. But with every crisis there is a silver lining. Meaning there is a way to utilize a tough time in your business to your advantage so it not a total waste. I'm going to explain exactly what I mean and how to take advantage of your next crisis. I'll actually share some real examples from my own business and how I was able to make sure a crisis never goes to waste. This is where your leadership will be tested when times are tough, not when things are easy. So let's make sure we pass with flying colors. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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When I look back at my own business and I think of the word crisis or I think of catastrophes, a few kind of come to mind and they still kind of hurt. Not as bad as they did in the moment. But one of the things I've learned over the years is that a crisis is an opportunity, a problem, even a possible business altering problem. Where I've been there, where you don't even know if your business will survive this crisis, those are actually where the rubber meets the road. This is where you get to show what you're made of as a leader and your team gets to rally and show you what they're made of. Overcoming challenges is one of the things that really can bring anybody together in any relationship, whether it's a husband and wife, partners in life, partners in business, friends. This is why they say if you could travel with somebody, they're probably a good friend to have. The friendship survives the trials of travel because travel is not always going to be easy. There's going to be delays, there's going to be hiccups, there's going to be some unforeseen circumstances. And the way you as friends survive that will show the strength of the relationship. So this is where your team and your business gets tested during a crisis. So how do you make sure you never let a crisis go to waste? Well, the thing that I learned along the way, and I like to say is rally around the solution. If you don't have a problem, you don't have something to solve, right? That's the beauty of a crisis, is that you actually have this big challenge you need to overcome. And this is kind of the best time for you to say to your team, hey, this is real, okay? This is not a drill. This is going on, being honest with them about the situation, just saying it like it is. How can we as a team overcome this? And this is one of the best team building activities you could ever do. There's also other benefits to overcoming a crisis, even when it comes to your own marketing and the way your customers will perceive you. And we'll talk about that a bit later, but let me give you an example to get things going. Recently we changed our checkout process at Webinar Ninja. We wanted to make it super easy and fast for people to sign up for a plan. And in that process, we redesigned the pages and we launched it to the public and we were pretty happy with that redesign. We're like, wow, it's a one page checkout, it's super quick, it's efficient, amazing. And things were rolling great. And then one day we got attacked by spammers, we got attacked by bots, people that attack, you know, somewhat popular websites with computer programs just to Greek havoc. Yes, there are weird, crazy, evil people out there that want to bring you down just to bring you down. That's the nature of being popular or having a business that is well known now. What's the big deal? Well, this actually causes a lot of problems to your system because you're getting a lot of traffic all of a sudden. Your system is processing a lot of data. Your database is getting logged up. And your database information, meaning the contacts and emails that you're getting with these signups, are all pretty dud. You know, it's screwing up your data. So you're gonna have to purge this data and clean it up once you actually solve this bot problem. How am I gonna stop these bots from signing up for my account? And mind you, we've been running our software company for seven years. We have all these security measures, we have email validation. There's all these different things we do to make sure that these are real signups. But we were getting hit hard. We're talking about a thousand hits an hour. So in the moment of this sort of crisis, of our system getting overloaded, we rallied the team, we said, hey team, we have this problem. We've never had this problem before. But we made a change to make the checkout simple. Do we have to pay the price to make it a little bit more complicated, a little bit slower to stop these bots from coming in? We need a solution and we need it fast. And this allowed our team to really start thinking creatively and understand that, hey, I need to participate, I need to help solve this problem. The company needs me now. And everybody was voicing their opinion. People were saying, hey, let's just validate what's happening here, how do we know they're bots and all that kind of stuff. And then some creative suggestions came out about how we can make the process just as fast but more secure in terms of protecting against bots, whether it's a high level captcha or something else. Eventually we came up with a great solution to stop the bots. Make the checkout process just as fast. And in the process, we actually found out a way or we came up with a way to distinguish between the bot signups and the real signups so that we can then remove them from the database and it won't mess up our data. This all happened in the span of maybe 12 hours. But instead of getting angry, instead of saying, woe to me, instead of saying, whose fault is this? You know, let's put the blame on somebody. We said, hey, let's take responsibility for this. Let's come up with a solution together. It doesn't matter how this happened, really. What matters is identifying the problem so we don't do it again and coming up with a great solution in a timely manner. After we stopped the bots and we solved the problem, the whole team felt a sense of accomplishment. We felt like, hey, even when people attack us, we know how to retaliate. We know how to shore up our system. We've learned something, and we're better for it now. I had bigger catastrophes. I had bigger problems in the past where they can't be solved in 12 hours. It took maybe a couple of weeks to kind of recognize how to move forward, and that's okay, too. And in those types of crises, your job as the leader is to keep morale high, is to keep confidence high, is to make sure people know we can do this. We've solved problems before, We've had big issues before, and we can tackle this one just like we did in the past. You got to be the cheerleader. You got to praise people for their hard work, Even if they haven't come up with a solution yet. They're getting closer. And I'm going to tell you that we actually have memes in our slack channels, in our communication channels, in the team reminding ourselves of the funny things that happened in the past, crises that we went through. And even though it hurts a bit because the memory still burns, it reminds us we are capable of big things. We're capable of overcoming challenges.

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Now, I mentioned earlier, when you have a crisis and you overcome it, especially if it's a public crisis, if other people Your customers know what happened. This can be a market. Listen. Nobody is immune to mistakes. So the best thing to do as a company is to get in front of it, is to say, hey, we had a problem and this is what we did to solve it. And now our system, our product, our service is back online and better than ever. By sending that message, you're showing people that, hey, we have things under control. Even though this happened, we came up with a solution quickly and it gives them confidence that, hey, we. That you can solve problems, that you care about these people, you care about your customers, that you will fulfill on your promise even if something outside your control happens. And by the way, as consumers, we're used to outages. We're used to things not being perfect. We're used to getting a product and it's not 100% and we have to ship it back. We know that perfection is a falsehood. That's just not how life is. And therefore businesses will make mistakes. But if you get in front of it, you own it and show how you took control of the situation. It shows that you are responsible, you take responsibility and that they can trust you. Listen, Samsung had phones blowing up in people's hands. They were literally catching fire in people's pockets. And they're still going strong today because they owned the situation. They said, yep, this is happening. For some reason, our phones are doing this on planes and we're gonna have to do something about it. We're gonna call these phones, we're gonna fix it, and the next version is not going to have this issue. People are still buying Samsung phones today, right? Why? Because Samsung knows you never let a crisis go to waste. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it, you hear, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Tomorrow's episode is Q and A Wednesday where we answer a question from one of our listeners. We got a question asking, how do I make a great offer for my product or service or without discounting it? Love this question because I'm not a big fan of discounts from a business point of view, I think there's other great ways for you to add value to your offer, make it appealing, and make a sale. We get into that in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you tune in for that. Best way to know that you won't miss it is just to hit subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The downs, the crises, the catastrophes that your business experiences. The does have an emotional toll on your business, okay? You can't endure them endlessly, okay? You need to have many wins in between to remind your team and yourself that this business is worth being a part of. Okay? So remember, you got to celebrate your wins so that when you do have a catastrophe, when you do have a crisis, it's not as, let's say, emotionally damaging to everybody because they know that your team can win because you remind them of it or over and over. That's your job as a leader, to let them know when they're doing well and when it's time to rally together to solve a crisis. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take. Foreign.

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