Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2620 How To Save Your Business From Going Out Of Business About this episode Is your business on the brink, and you’re feeling the heat? Profits are slipping, costs are climbing, and time is running out to turn it around. If it feels like your business is hanging by a thread, this episode is a must-listen. Omar gets straight to the point with a practical action plan for those make-or-break moments. Inspired by the tough-love insights from The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, he’ll walk you through key steps to get back on track. From cutting costs and refocusing your team, to breaking the rules when it’s called for, this episode is packed with strategies you can use right now. It’s time to step up, embrace the “wartime CEO” mindset, and make the tough calls that could save your business. Hit play at the top of the page and let Omar guide you through the process with wisdom from his own hard-earned experience!-Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hey Fidelity,
0:02 Speaker 00 how can I remember to invest every month?
0:05 Speaker 01 With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.
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0:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?
0:19 Speaker 01 You will find them where you left them.
0:23 Speaker 02 Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.
0:30 Speaker 00 What do I gift my mom and nieces?
0:31 Speaker 03 Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Lego.
0:38 Speaker 00 Oh, Dad loves music.
0:39 Speaker 03 Sonos can bring his songs to life with sound that hits just right.
0:46 Speaker 00 And my coffee-obsessed bestie?
0:48 Speaker 03 Delongi Brews Coffee, right for morning's extra ride.
0:51 Speaker 00 All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?
0:53 Speaker 03 We knew, now you do too. Shop gifts, no love at Walmart.
1:00 Speaker 00 If your business is on the brink of going out of business, this episode might just save it. Not with hype, not with theory, but with real, battle-tested leadership. Ben Horowitz, in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, says peacetime CEOs know that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEOs violate protocol in order to win. And right now, if your business is struggling, on the brink of going out of business, you are in a war. And wartime is not business as usual. It's not like it was before when things were great. So you need to act differently during wartime. Today, we're to talk about exactly what you need to do when the enemy is not a competitor,
1:44 Speaker 00 but the end of your business itself. There's no time to waste, so let's get into it.
1:54 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:07 Speaker 00 Let me explain this very clearly. Peacetime is when your business is humming along. Everything is fine. You're profitable. And that's when you're peacetime CEO. You're focused on long-term strategy, building a brand, team morale, culture, all that stuff. Good stuff. When you're in a wartime where your business is about to fold in a few months because you're not making enough profit, you need to be wartime CEO. A wartime CEO focuses on survival, speed to hard decisions. They're relentless with their execution. You don't run the business the same way in both situations. And I'm speaking out of experience. I've been there. In my 10-year run of building Webinar Ninja before we got acquired by ProProfs,
2:50 Speaker 00 I hit a wall in revenue. Growth flattened. Our costs were high. Churn was creeping up. And I had a choice. Keep managing my business like it was peacetime? Now, listen, I want to make this very clear. I'm not trying to be aggressive for aggression's sake, right? We don't want war. We don't want to be in this situation. But when we find ourselves in a war situation, we can't act the same way. We have to do different things. And I want to make sure that this is clear and give you a game plan so you can get out of this situation and get into peacetime again very quickly. Let's start with the first thing you need to do, and that's cut relentlessly immediately, okay? This is where it gets hard. And this is why it's the first thing you've got to do,
3:31 Speaker 00 because it's going to make the most impact. I'm talking about cut features, cut tools, cut costs. Yes, even team members if you absolutely must. And this is where it gets tough, like I said. But if there is no direct ROI correlation to that team member, in wartime, they need to get cut. Because basically wartime means you're making less than what your costs are, and you need to cut down your costs. Again, Ben Horwitz says that wartime CEOs "make fast, often harsh decisions without waiting for consensus." This is a hard one, because... You have to reconcile the fact that peace will come later. But right now, survival comes first. You've got to stay alive. You can't save a business by trying to please everybody. And you're going to do some stuff that you don't normally do,
4:15 Speaker 00 because this is not a peacetime. You're going to have to cut costs, you're going to have to cut some people sometimes. You're going to have to make some tough decisions that are going to save your business. Why? Because the decisions you made up to this point led you to this point, led you to the fact that your business is about to go under. So you can't do the same thing. You've got to do something different to get a different result.
4:37 Speaker 04 Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app?
4:42 Speaker 01 Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs.
4:50 Speaker 04 That's music to my ears.
4:51 Speaker 01 I can only talk.
4:53 Speaker 02 Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only. $0 commission does not apply to customers designated by Fidelity as a professional equity trader. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a service fee of $100. See details at fidelity.com/commissions. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.
5:08 Speaker 05 What do I gift my mom and nieces?
5:09 Speaker 03 Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Lego.
5:16 Speaker 05 Oh, Dad loves music.
5:17 Speaker 03 Sonos can bring his songs to life with sound that hits just right.
5:24 Speaker 05 And my coffee-obsessed bestie?
5:25 Speaker 03 Delongi brews coffee right for morning's extra price.
5:29 Speaker 05 All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?
5:31 Speaker 03 We knew. Now you do too. Shop gifts, no love at Walmart.
5:39 Speaker 00 Step two: Shift focus to revenue now. Forget experiments, forget side projects, forget polish right now. When going out of business is knocking at the door, you need to ask some really important questions. What can we sell right now that solves a real pain for maximum revenue? Back when we were struggling in Webinar Ninja and plateauing, we paused feature development and we focused all our efforts on getting customers' results as fast as possible. For us, that looked like beefing up our Efforts with support, with onboarding, with webinars, with education, with one-on-one calls with our customers. That allows us to close the gap, get some wins, get some upsells, sell products to existing customers.
6:24 Speaker 00 And it allowed us to really kick up dust and make something happen, save the situation. And that catapulted us to another level of business. Don't go quiet in this moment. You want to go loud. You want to talk to as many customers as possible, sell as much as possible, serve as much as possible to your customers. You want to crank up the volume of your service as high as possible, turn that dial to max. Because right now, you need to make as much revenue. And right now, the best way to do that is to tap into your existing leads and customers. Step three, over communicate with your team. In wartime, people need clarity and direction. Your team is looking to you for leadership. You can't disappear.
7:08 Speaker 00 You gotta be there for them and you gotta communicate the situation. You need to call a daily stand-up, a team meeting every day, daily, so that everybody's on the same page. We're all marching in the same direction. We want to update them, the whole team, constantly throughout the week. We want to be brutally honest with them with a plan. This is what we're doing. And when you're in the thick of it, as I said to my own team, I had to say to them, we're not dying. Okay, we're not gonna end this business. We've all worked way too hard for this to tank. Okay, we're gonna catch this before it starts to move in the wrong direction. And we're gonna do everything we can with different action. But we need every hand on deck, no passengers, all crew.
7:54 Speaker 00 We're all rowing in the same direction. And you need to talk to them and be honest with them that this is gonna be a tough time. This is going to be hard work. The next few months, we're gonna work harder than we ever worked before. But there'll be time for retreats and fun and time off and all that stuff, once we get back to peacetime. That unity really pulled us out and into a different level of playing. We were playing a different game at that point and we were basically unstoppable. And we're able to just do anything. We're able to do or be able to achieve the goals we had to get to that peacetime. And I'm thankful to say that we did grow from that time. We did move up from that situation and grew beyond that point. But you're going to need to have some honest conversations with your team. This is the time for you to just level with them.
8:38 Speaker 00 I remember reading in Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. He sat down with his team members and said, "Talk to your spouses. Talk to your family. Tell them that the next few months are going to be tough. They're going to be long hours. Be honest, just set up expectations and you've got to just give them a choice. Are you in or are you out? Because if you're in, we're all going to go for it. We're all going to work hard all together. We can't have somebody who's halfway through. And if you're halfway, no problem. You know, we can say goodbye right now. It's harsh, it's tough, but you have no choice. That's the point. The choice you have is go out of business or please somebody. No, you need to right now, make sure your business is saved. And that requires honest conversations. Step four, be willing to burn the manual when needed.
9:23 Speaker 00 All those protocols and processes you created in peacetime, they were good for peacetime and they're good for the future. But right now, sometimes you're going to have to skip over them. Right now, they might not matter as much. When time is against you, when you're days away, months away from going out of business, you need speed. Agility matters, execution matters. If a decision helps the business survive and it's illegal and it's ethical, you've got to do it. You can fix the polish or the roughness of it later. This is the hard thing about running a business is that sometimes things are going to get tough and leadership under fire isn't about perfection. It's about making the next right move.
10:05 Speaker 00 And then as you get out of this situation and you're in more of a peaceful situation, you can have more time to deliberate your moves where you can make better decisions. But right now, we want to make the best possible decision under the pressure and time constraints you have. Look, if you're here right now, still listening to the words I'm saying to you, you already have what it takes. I can tell. Being in wartime mode is scary, okay? It's stressful. I look back at it, I'm like, oh man, I'd never want to be there again. It's something that is very, very stressful. I'm just gonna tell you right now, that's how it is. But it's also clarifying. It shows you what matters in the moment, who matters, and what you're made of. It's those moments that I'm most proud of, not the wins, it's
10:49 Speaker 00 getting out of the trough of sorrow and, you know, those tough times. And if you make it through, and I believe you will, you'll be 10 times the leader you were before. Because peacetime builds a business, a really beautiful, smooth-running business. But wartime builds entrepreneurs. It builds people that can get through anything, no matter what the business is. The next business, the next business, the next venture. If you found this episode helpful, if you want to continue to learn from me, I encourage you to subscribe to our Three Things newsletter. It's my way to coach you from afar with weekly guidance, and it's designed to help you move forward every single week. Every week, I'm gonna give you three things. Something to think about, something to change your mindset,
11:33 Speaker 00 something to do so that you're moving forward every week, and something to learn so that you're scaling up and becoming a better entrepreneur. You're not alone in this. I got your back. Now go out there and win your war.
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