Business & Entrepreneurship
What to Do When the Business Year Goes Sideways
Bad quarters, lost clients, failed launches. Pema Chödrön has a gentler way of moving through these, and it actually helps. No five-step recovery plan.
Most business advice for bad quarters is some variation of “double down” or “pivot fast.” It’s all motion. Pema Chödrön, who is a Buddhist nun and not a business coach, has a different suggestion. Sit with it. Don’t sprint out of the discomfort. Lean in.
I know - that sounds soft, especially when revenue is down 40% and a client just ghosted you mid-project. But hear me out, because the harder I’ve tried to muscle through bad business stretches, the worse my decisions during them have gotten. Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart didn’t change my plan. It changed my pacing. That turned out to matter more.
The instinct that makes everything worse
When the year goes sideways, the panic response runs a familiar script. You scramble. You take a client you’d have said no to in a better month. You launch something half-baked because you need cash. You burn an evening writing five frantic pitches to people who are not the right fit. You wake up at 4 a.m. doing math on your savings runway.
None of this is dumb. It’s just badly timed. The decisions you make in your worst week are the ones you’ll be living with for the next six months. And panic-decisions are almost never the same shape as the decisions you’d have made with two weeks of breathing room.
Chödrön’s whole thing is that the urge to escape discomfort is what causes most of the damage. Not the discomfort itself. The squirming.
What “lean in” actually looks like
This is the part where the advice usually gets vague and annoying. So let me make it concrete, because I’ve been here several times and I’ve watched what works.
Don’t make any big moves in the first week
When a launch flops, a client leaves, or a quarter goes red, the first impulse is action. Resist that. Not forever - just for the first week.
Your nervous system is in alert mode. Your judgment is compressed. Anything you decide in week one will be filtered through panic, and panic-decisions look smart for about 48 hours and then look bad for a long time. Get through week one without committing to anything new. That’s the whole assignment.
This includes: don’t announce anything publicly, don’t fire any clients, don’t onboard any sketchy ones, don’t reduce your rates, don’t sign up for any “save my business” courses, don’t email anyone an apology, and don’t post about it. You can do all of those things in week two if they still seem right. They usually won’t.
Look at the actual numbers
Bad business stretches feel bigger than they are because the brain inflates them. The runway feels shorter, the loss feels larger, the future feels narrower. The fix is unglamorous. Open a spreadsheet.
How much actual money do you have. How many months of bare-minimum expenses does that cover. Who owes you what. What’s actually on the calendar for next month, even if it’s less than you’d like. Most “the year is falling apart” feelings shrink by 30% once they’re written down as numbers. Not because the numbers are good - because the numbers are finite, and the feeling was infinite.
I’ve written about this elsewhere in the one spreadsheet that runs my business - when things are going well, the spreadsheet is optional. When things are going sideways, it’s the difference between clarity and spiral.
Name what actually broke
This is the lean-in move. You sit down - actually sit down, with coffee, no Slack open - and you write out, in plain sentences, what went wrong. Not your action plan. Just what happened.
The launch didn’t sell because I priced it for the wrong audience.
The client left because I’d been resenting them for four months and they could feel it.
Q2 was thin because I stopped sending pitches in March when the bigger project ate my calendar, and now there’s no pipeline.
You’re not solving anything yet. You’re describing. The point is to look at what happened squarely, without flinching. The reason people don’t do this is that it’s uncomfortable - the honest version usually involves something you did or didn’t do, and that’s harder to write than “the market shifted.”
But here’s the trade. If you stay vague about what broke, you can’t fix it. You’ll just do something else and hope. If you name it, the next move is often obvious - sometimes humblingly so. The discomfort of naming the thing is the price of getting a real next step.
Talk to one person who’s been there
Not a coach. Not Twitter. One actual friend who has run a small business through a bad year. The conversation should not be “what should I do.” It should be “here’s what’s happening, can you tell me what your year that year felt like.”
What you’re after isn’t advice. It’s evidence that bad stretches are survivable and end. When you’re inside a sideways quarter, the brain becomes incapable of believing the stretch will end. Hearing someone else say “yeah, my Q3 of 2021 was a disaster and I’m still here” is worth more than ten productivity articles.
Pick someone honest. Avoid people whose answer to every business problem is “you should do what I did.” You want someone who can describe how messy theirs was without dressing it up.
Pick the smallest useful next step
Not the big strategic pivot. The smallest concrete thing.
Send three pitches by Friday. Or: pay the freelancer you owe, even if it stings. Or: send a soft check-in to two former clients you’ve gone quiet on. Or: update the one page on your site that’s been embarrassing you for a year. One thing, doable in a week, that moves the needle a little. The 2-list strategy is the trick I use here - pick one thing, ignore the other 24 ideas your panic brain is generating.
The reason the small step works isn’t that it fixes the year. It’s that motion in the right direction breaks the loop where you’re sitting still and the situation gets steadily worse in your head. Once there’s evidence on the table that you’re capable of doing one useful thing, the spiral has nothing to feed on.
Let the bad feeling do its job
This is the Chödrön part that the productivity people skip. The bad feeling is not pointless. It’s signal. It’s telling you something about how the business was being run before things broke.
Maybe you’d been over-reliant on one client. Maybe you’d been ignoring a niche that was clearly drying up. Maybe you’d been working in a way that wasn’t sustainable, and the breakdown is the bill arriving. The bad quarter is rude, but it’s not random - it’s information about a system you’d been ignoring.
If you sprint out of the discomfort, you don’t read the information. You just rebuild the same brittle thing and hope. If you sit with it for a week or two, the information becomes available. You start to see what part of your operation you’d been pretending wasn’t fragile.
This is the part that takes practice, and it’s the part I keep failing at. The temptation to escape the bad feeling is enormous. But the bad feeling is doing free work for you, if you let it.
When to actually move
After a couple of weeks of sitting with it - looking at numbers, naming what broke, talking to one person, taking one small step - the bigger moves start to surface on their own. Not as panic responses. As actual considered next moves.
That’s the difference. Decisions made from the spiral feel urgent and look obvious; decisions made from the other side of the spiral feel calm and often look strange to people who weren’t sitting with the situation. The strange-looking ones are usually the better ones.
So: bad quarter, lost client, failed launch. Not the end. Just a part of the year that’s asking you to slow down before you speed up. The motion can wait a week. The spreadsheet, the honest description, the one phone call, and the one small step - those come first.
If the broader topic of riding out hard professional stretches resonates, how to be productive when you’re depressed is a gentler companion piece for when the sideways year is also messing with the person living it.