PKF Texas – Entrepreneur’s Playbook®:Elevating a Problem Into a Crisis

by | Oct 15, 2010 | PKF Texas - The Entrepreneur's Playbook®

Note: Running Fridays in FromGregsHead.comis a continuing series of tips brought to you by Greg Price. These run Saturday mornings during the BusinessMaker’s Radio Show on KPRC 950AM. Audio files can be found on the PKF Texas – Entrepreneur’s Playbook® page of the PKF Texas website.

In today’s fast paced totally connected world, sometime the challenges of day to day become overwhelming and it requires calm, cool and collected heads in addressing the issue.  Have you ever contributed to a situation and made it worse?  Have you ever elevated a problem into a crisis?

Here are some examples:

Problem #1: You have an abusive boss who makes you miserable. It’s not a crisis yet, but if is not resolved, it will become one. You know that sooner or later, you and he/she are going to have words, the result of which will be your unemployment.  Since you are a month behind on your mortgage payment and two months behind on your car note, if it were to happen today, your problem would quickly become a crisis.

Problem #2: You discover that, as a result of an incompetent purchasing agent, and poor inventory controls you have a warehouse full of obsolete inventory. Its market value is half of what it’s on the books for. Now, that’s a problem, but if the bank discovers that bit of truth, they will call the note, and that will create a crisis.

In Bill Peery’s Common Sense Series he outlines the issue.  The common thread in each of these tragic tales is that you know what will inevitably happen. But, if you use your head and don’t do something precipitous, you can determine when the problem will become a crisis. And, you do it on your schedule, not theirs. You elevate the problem to a crisis when you are ready to deal with it.

You resign your position when you have a new job to go to. You share your inventory problem with the bank when you have alternative financing arranged. It’s about taking charge of your own destiny. It’s about managing your life.

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