This is a post I've been putting off, because it's the most likely to be misread. So before I start. This is not a war story. It's not a complaint. It's not an attempt to rewrite any narrative. It's the playbook I wish someone had handed me on the morning when everything was, in fact, breaking at once. In the first 72 hours, everything is still open. That's the only thing to remember.
Every founder will eventually have a version of this experience. Most of them will have it quietly. A few will have it in public, with people watching. The mechanics are the same regardless of scale. What changes is how visible the mistakes are. The classics on crisis leadership — Harvey Golub's American Express turnaround plus everything Harvard Business Review has written on the topic — all converge on the same set of moves. I'll add one thing they usually leave out. This is as much a test of grit and personal tenacity as it is of strategy. When the building is on fire and the investors are watching, the thing that gets you through is not being smart. It's being willing.
The 72-hour rule
There is a window, when a company starts to break, that lasts roughly 72 hours. In that window, your decisions set the trajectory for the next six months. Wrong call in the first 72 hours? Usually recoverable but expensive. No call at all in the first 72 hours — if you freeze, deliberate, or wait for "more information"? Usually not recoverable. I've seen this pattern play out in multiple distressed companies, including from the operator's seat.
So here's what I did. What I got right. What I got wrong. And what I'd do the same again. The professional turnaround firms — FTI Consulting and Alvarez & Marsal — both publish good case material on the first 100 days of a distressed engagement. The patterns they document line up almost exactly with what I lived through. The patterns they don't document are the ones at 3am when you're alone with yourself.
Hour 1 to 24: get to ground truth. Fast. Brutal.
The first thing I did when I understood the scope of what we were facing was call the three people who owed me nothing and who would tell me the truth. Not board members. Not lawyers. Not the management team, all of whom had their own incentives. Three operators — two former CEOs, one current CFO at a different company — who had no skin in our game and would say exactly what they thought without filtering it.
I asked each of them the same three questions. If you were sitting in my chair right now, what would you do in the next 24 hours? What am I missing that I don't even know I'm missing? Who on my team can I trust in the next 90 days, and who can't I?
Thirty minutes with each of those calls gave me more usable information than the next thirty hours of meetings with my own team. Not because my team was bad. Because my team was too close, too scared, and too invested to be honest with me — including with themselves. A management team in a breaking company is not a diagnostic tool. It's a set of people trying to survive, and survival is the enemy of truth.
In a crisis, your own people are the last people who can tell you the truth. Not because they're lying. Because they can't afford to know the truth, including about themselves.
Hour 24 to 48: make exactly three decisions. Make them stick. Say no to everything else.
The second thing I did — and this is the one I credit most for anything that went right — was force myself to make exactly three decisions in the next 24 hours and communicate them clearly. Not twelve. Not a "100-day plan." Three. Decisions small enough to execute and big enough to matter.
Mine were:
- Stop defending the narrative. Start rebuilding credibility. Immediate change in how we communicated with the Street. Less optimism. More specifics. Shorter gaps between saying something and doing it. Do what you say, say what you do — that was the posture, and it had to become visible in the next filing, not the one after.
- Cut costs to 12 months of runway. Not 6. Not 18. Six months wasn't enough breathing room to execute. Eighteen gave the team too much comfort to make hard choices. Twelve months was the amount of discomfort the company needed to actually move. Pain is a design choice in a turnaround. You pick the dose.
- Personally own communication with the top 20 people. No HR memo. No cascading town hall. One-on-ones with the 20 people who had the most leverage over whether we recovered. A direct ask from me about whether they were in or out for the next 12 months.
That's it. Three decisions. I said no to every other demand on my attention for 48 hours. People were furious. Some of them were right to be. But the alternative — trying to do twelve things at once in a breaking company — is how breaking companies become broken companies. Grit in a crisis looks like the willingness to disappoint everyone simultaneously for 48 hours so you can help them for the next 12 months.
Hour 48 to 72: write the letter you'd be willing to read back to your board in a year
The third thing I did — and this is the one almost no CEO does, and the one I recommend most — was sit down in the middle of the night and write a private letter to myself. Addressed to me, one year in the future. It said: here is what's happening right now, here is what I think is true, here is what I'm choosing to do and why, here is what I'm scared of, and here is the version of this story I want to be able to tell in 12 months if everything works out.
I didn't share that letter with anyone. I printed it and put it in my desk drawer. I read it once a week for the next year.
Here's why the letter matters. When you lead through a crisis, your memory will rewrite what you believed and why. You'll convince yourself six months in that you always knew what you were doing, or that you were forced into decisions you actually chose, or that mistakes you made were unavoidable when they weren't. The letter is a receipt. It forces you to stay honest with yourself about the actual decision-making process — which is the only thing you can control.
What actually happens to you personally
The 72-hour playbook is the operating side. There's also a personal side, and I haven't seen anybody write about it honestly, so let me try.
You won't sleep normally for weeks. You'll wake up at 3am with your heart beating too fast. You'll snap at people you love. You'll lose weight, or gain weight, depending on how your body handles stress. You'll find yourself reading articles about other people's crises and crying at inappropriate times. You'll wonder, seriously, whether you're the right person to be doing this. You'll question every decision you've made for the last ten years. And then you'll get up and do it again.
The only advice I can give about the personal side is this. Tell exactly one person the whole truth every day. Not your team. Not your board. Not the press. One human being you trust, who owes you nothing, who will listen without trying to fix it. For me, my wife. For others it's a therapist, a friend, a YPO forum member. Pick one. Do it every day. The cost of not having that outlet is that the pressure comes out sideways, in decisions you'll regret.
And the other thing. Remind yourself, out loud, that this is survivable. I use a line to myself when things are hardest. "Would you take $10 million right now if you had to die tomorrow? No. So your life is worth more than $10 million every single day." Put the crisis next to that number. Suddenly the headline, the analysts, the board — all of it gets smaller. Not unimportant. But smaller.
What I got wrong
Not writing hagiography here. I got things wrong. I waited too long to make a personnel change that everyone around me knew was necessary. I held on to a narrative about "what the market would understand" longer than I should have. I tried to protect a few people from bad news they needed to hear — which hurt them more than the bad news would have. I took investor money I couldn't return, and that still weighs on me.
None of those mistakes were fatal. But I think about them more often than the things I got right, because those are the lessons I actually paid for. The things I got right came from intuition built over 20 years. The things I got wrong came from specific moments where I made a choice I knew wasn't optimal because the optimal choice was too uncomfortable in the moment. Grit is sometimes just the willingness to be uncomfortable 20 seconds earlier than your instinct wants you to be.
The ask I'd make of any CEO reading this in the middle of a crisis
If you're reading this because something is breaking right now, here's my ask. Stop reading. Call three people who owe you nothing. Make three decisions in the next 48 hours. Write one letter to yourself you'll read in a year. Tell one human the whole truth today.
Everything else — the board meeting, the press release, the legal strategy, the cap table — comes after those four things. Not because those four things solve the crisis. Because without those four things you cannot see the crisis clearly enough to solve it. And seeing it clearly is the whole job.
You don't need me to turn around your company. You need me to tell you that the thing you're going through is survivable, that the 72 hours matter, and that the version of you on the other side — if you do the work honestly — will be a substantially better operator than the one who walked into the crisis. I know that, because I am that person. And I'd bet on a CEO who's been here over one who hasn't, every single time.
Here's the challenge. If you're in the first 72 hours right now, close this tab and do the four things. If you're not in a crisis, print this page and put it somewhere you can find it. Your odds of never needing it are lower than you think. The CEOs who survive this stuff are not the smart ones. They're the ones who were prepared to be honest with themselves while everything was on fire.
If the crisis is the one that comes before the listing rather than after, see PCAOB readiness from the CEO chair.