Five crisis leadership moves for founders in a downturn

Executive overview

In a crisis, leaders default to freezing, faking confidence, or cutting everything at once. None of those work. The five moves here give founders a practical sequence: stabilise yourself, lead without a complete plan, make aggressive requests before cutting costs, spot breakout opportunities, and maintain execution rhythm.

In a crisis, the leader who acts without all the answers — and brings the team with them — outperforms the one who waits for certainty.

Take care of yourself first

• Anxiety and sleeplessness are normal; lean into the feelings rather than suppressing them.
• Notice where stress shows up physically — don't numb or avoid it.
• Leaders who acknowledge their own emotional state create psychological safety for their teams.
• Putting on a false face undermines trust; authenticity is more effective than performed confidence.

Lead without a plan

• You don't have a plan yet — and that's fine. Lead anyway.
• Go to your team and say you don't know the answer; invite them to solve it together.
• This is servant leadership in practice: leaders creating leaders.
• Communicate at minimum once a day — to employees, customers, vendors, and partners.
• Your job is not to tell people everything will be okay. Tell them they're capable and you're in it together.

Make radical requests before cutting costs

• The instinct to lay people off or cancel contracts is the default; radical requests come first.
• Call your landlord, key suppliers, and service providers — ask for deferred terms, concessions, or free periods.
• Lead with genuine empathy: understand what you're asking of them before making the request.
• Miracles happen when you're not trying to get one over on people.
• Avoid taking on large loans to cover the gap — debt loads will compound pain on the other side of the recession.
• A single conversation yielded one client: a year of free rent in exchange for quarterly financial check-ins.
• Another produced 90-day terms and a $5M line of credit from a supplier who became a preferred partner.

Find the breakout opportunity

• Every recession contains massive dislocations even if the overall GDP shrinkage is small.
• Use the SWT exercise (a strategic version of SWOT): map your permanent strengths and weaknesses, then scan for trends across industries, not just your own.
• Look broadly — what's happening in families, health, media, restaurants, entertainment?
• Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now.
• Engage the whole team in trend-spotting; you won't find the best opportunity alone.
• Near-term opportunities exist right now — offering services for free, gift cards, delivery pivots, new distribution channels.

Keep your execution habits

• Crises don't suspend the need for priorities, metrics, and meeting rhythms — they make them more important.
• Set and revise priorities regularly; keep dashboards and progress visible.
• Daily huddles, weekly meetings, and quarterly planning sessions can all move to remote formats.
• Don't try to do everything at once — if you commit to one daily communication, do that one reliably.

Verne Harnish's five C's

1. Communicate — daily, or twice daily
2. Community — engage and support customers and your broader network
3. Clean up — use downtime to clear backlogs and inefficiencies
4. Cash — improve and optimise your cash position
5. Calm — take care of yourself so you can lead with steadiness

On workforce decisions

• Laying people off versus reducing hours is a context-specific call — know your state's unemployment rules.
• Retaining your hardest-to-replace people is the priority; redeploy them to other tasks if volume drops.
• If you cut hours or pay, consider taking no salary yourself until you can restore it — leading from the front matters.
• Commission-based employees with no revenue path may be better served by a clean layoff so they can access unemployment.
• Have a direct, honest conversation with each person about their options before deciding for them.