There is the business you planned to build
And then there is the business you actually end up running
They are never the same; unfortunately
The plan had customers arriving roughly when expected, revenue moving in the right direction, costs behaving themselves, good people staying and competitors remaining conveniently predictable
However, reality has other ideas
A customer you thought was secure leaves
A promising product doesn’t sell
A key employee hands in their notice
Costs rise just as sales begin to soften
A competitor appears with something faster, cheaper or simply better timed
Or sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all, it’s just that business stops moving
And you’re left staring at the numbers wondering:
What do I do now?
That’s the part of entrepreneurship I’m interested in, not because success isn’t worth talking about, rather what happens between the plan and the outcome is often where the most consequential decisions get made
The business plan doesn’t survive contact with reality
We like certainty in business - forecasts, targets, strategies and five-year plans
Don’t get me wrong, they are useful as we need some idea of where we’re going
But, the problem begins when reality stops cooperating and we interpret that as evidence that we’re failing
Entrepreneurship doesn’t work like that, simply a customer can change their minds, markets move, even technology changes what is possible and worse part, people may disappoint us, we can make assumptions that turn out to be wrong
And sometimes we make perfectly reasonable decisions that still produce disappointing results
The question isn’t whether something unexpected will happen, because it will
The more useful question is:
How good are you at responding when it does?
That, to me, is where entrepreneurial resilience begins
Resilience isn’t just carrying on
There’s a version of entrepreneurship that celebrates persistence above almost everything else
Keep going
Push through
Don’t quit
Believe in yourself
Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to hear
But sometimes it isn’t
Because continuing with something that clearly isn’t working isn’t necessarily resilience
Sometimes it’s fear
Sometimes it’s ego
Sometimes it’s the difficulty of admitting that the plan we were convinced would work... didn’t
Real resilience requires something harder than simply enduring, it requires being able to look at what’s happening, separate the facts from the emotion surrounding them, and ask:
Given what I know now, what is the best next move?
Sometimes the answer is to persist
Sometimes it’s to change direction
Sometimes it’s to cut costs
Raise prices
Let someone go
Hire someone
Walk away from a customer
Abandon a product
Ask for help
Start again
And occasionally, the resilient decision is to stop
The difficult part is knowing which one you’re dealing with
When something goes wrong, don’t immediately solve it
Entrepreneurs are problem-solvers - naturally, right?
That’s useful until our instinct to act becomes stronger than our willingness to understand the problem
Sales fall?
Spend more on marketing
A customer leaves?
Find another customer
Margins shrink?
Raise prices
You’re overwhelmed?
Hire someone
Those responses might be correct
But there’s a question that should come before all of them:
What is actually happening here?
Suppose sales have fallen 20%
That’s a fact
“Customers don’t want our product anymore” is an interpretation
Maybe fewer people are finding you
Maybe the same number are finding you but fewer are buying
Maybe they’re still buying but spending less
Maybe one large customer distorted last year’s comparison
Maybe demand has shifted
Maybe a competitor changed the market
Maybe your product really is losing relevance
Each explanation points towards a different decision
React to the symptom too quickly and you can spend considerable time and money solving the wrong problem
Three questions before the next decision
When something unexpected happens in your business, try asking:
1. What do I actually know?
Strip away the story you’ve started telling yourself
What happened?
What do the numbers show?
What have customers actually said?
What changed?
What hasn’t?
Facts first.
2. What am I assuming?
This is harder
We fill gaps in information remarkably quickly
“The customer left because we’re too expensive.”
“The launch failed because the product isn’t good enough.”
“My competitors are doing better than me.”
“Nobody is spending.”
Perhaps
But what evidence do you have?
An assumption isn’t useless. It simply needs to be recognised as an assumption rather than promoted prematurely to a fact
3. What decision genuinely needs making now?
Not every problem requires an immediate strategic response
Some do
If you’ve got six weeks of cash left, urgency is real - but sometimes the pressure to “do something” comes from discomfort rather than necessity
Instead, ask:
What happens if I don’t make this decision today?
If the answer is “very little,” you may have bought yourself something valuable:
time to understand the situation properly
Protect your options
One principle we’ll return to often in Resilient Entrepreneur is optionality
When uncertainty is high, avoid unnecessarily closing doors
Imagine you’ve just lost your largest customer
You could immediately cut three employees
Perhaps that’s necessary
But before doing so, you’d want to understand your cash position, sales pipeline, available capacity, likelihood of replacing the revenue and how long you can responsibly carry the current cost base
Why?
Because once those people leave, rebuilding that capability may be difficult
The reverse is also true
Taking on a large permanent cost because you’ve had three unusually strong months can remove options later
Resilience isn’t only about recovering from setbacks
It’s about building enough flexibility into the business that a setback doesn’t leave you with only one possible move
The next 72 hours
When something significant goes wrong, try resisting the temptation to create a twelve-month recovery strategy immediately
Start smaller
Take a piece of paper and write down:
What happened?
One sentence. Facts only
What is the immediate impact?
Cash? Customers? Operations? People? Reputation?
What don’t I know yet?
This is often the most valuable list
What assumptions am I making?
Write them down rather than carrying them around in your head.
What decision actually needs making in the next 72 hours?
There may be one
There may be several
There may be none
What can wait until I know more?
That final question can prevent a surprising number of bad decisions
This is what Resilient Entrepreneur is about
I didn't create my publication and coaching practice to tell entrepreneurs to work harder
There is enough of that already, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending that every failure is secretly wonderful because it teaches us something - No some failures hurt
Some mistakes are expensive
Some periods of running a business are frightening, frustrating and lonely
But difficult moments contain decisions
And those decisions influence what happens next
That’s what we’ll explore here
Cash getting tight
Customers leaving
Pricing decisions
Failed launches
Difficult hires
Changing markets
AI and disruption
Founder exhaustion
Growth that creates as many problems as it solves
When to persist
When to adapt
When to rebuild
And when something happens that wasn’t in the plan, we’ll keep returning to one question:
What do you do next?
Because resilience isn’t pretending the setback didn’t happen, it’s seeing the situation clearly enough to make the next useful move
Running a business rarely goes exactly to plan. Resilient Entrepreneur Newsletter is practical thinking for the decisions, setbacks and turning points that come with building something.
If that sounds like the kind of conversation you’d find useful, subscribe. And if you’re navigating something difficult in your business right now, tell me about it. It may be something we could explore here.