I have to be sincere with you. My brain works better with problems to solve than with environments where the temperature and the pressure are controlled. I was taught that way. Difficulty motivates me.
Many years ago I asked a question to a very close friend. He is a traumatologist. For more than a decade he worked as a surgeon in a hospital in Brazil, next to a violent favela and next to a road people called the Road of the Dead, because of the number of accidents on it. I asked him how he coped with it. How do you support yourself, seeing so many car accidents and so many gunshot wounds from gang fights, week after week.
His answer was straight, with no reaction on his face. Because somebody has to do it.
I will always remember that. It is the reason I love the work I do, sitting inside difficulty and complexity in family businesses. Like my friend the doctor. Adversity makes you sharper.
So let me break down how to work with adversity.
Whoever Has No Problem Is Not Alive
Everybody has their own. The successful owner has them, the struggling one has them, the family that looks perfect from outside has them. The question is never whether you have a problem. The question is what you do in the first months after it appears, when it is still small enough to be handled.
The First Rule Is Do Not Deny
I have helped owners and families who denied that they had a problem at all. The reason is almost always the same. The company was always good. They built it with their own hands. Their father built it. It carried the family for thirty or fifty years. So when things start to go sour, the mind refuses the information and tells them that everything is fine.
What makes this dangerous is that it is not one person doing it. Families fool themselves collectively. Everyone reinforces everyone else, in meetings and at lunch, and the story stays comfortable. Then they see reality only when it is already ugly, already public, already expensive, and already hard to fix.
A problem seen at month three has ten solutions. The same problem seen at year three has two, and both of them hurt.
Master Your Problems
This is the part I care about most.
It is your problem. You cannot hand it over to a lawyer, a doctor, a banker, a CFO, a COO or a consultant and consider it dealt with. If the problem materialises, they are not going to lose anything. They close the file and move to the next client. You do not close anything. You go home with it.
The person who most needs to understand your problem is you.
From 2011 to 2021 I carried a problem inside my own business that, had it landed, would have taken the most important part of the company with it, and with that part, the work of more than one generation.
Ten years. A decade of my life measured in hearings, in filings, in nights that did not end.
It was a very specific legal matter, and the market held only a handful of people who truly understood it. My adversary hired the best of them. I hired the second best. Then my advisor fell seriously ill.
So I fought it alone. I remember saying it to myself with complete clarity. I have to master this, and I have to master it by myself. That is what I did. I went into that matter until I knew it better than almost anyone left standing in the room, on either side.
I did not win that point. It went against me, and I want to be plain about it.
But a long fight moves the ground it is fought on. The other side chose an agreement over a continuation, and that agreement did not exist at the beginning. It was created by the way the fight had been carried.
What came out of it was better for me and for my family than winning would have been.
That is the part worth taking. A problem you hold yourself does not only get defended. It gets reshaped. And nobody reshapes a problem that is not theirs.
The Test Is Simple
The other day I was talking with a CEO. I asked three questions about matters that were central to his own company. He could not explain what was actually happening in any of them. Not the numbers, not the exposure, not the sequence of events. He knew who was handling each one, and that was all he knew.
That is the moment to worry. Not when the problem gets worse, but when you notice you can no longer describe it in your own words.
So I beg you, if you are reading this. Do not give your problem to a third party and consider yourself covered. Ask yourself whether you could explain it, from beginning to end, to someone who knows nothing about your business. If you cannot, you do not own it yet.
There Are Excellent People Out There
I want to be fair here. There are outstanding professionals available to you, and I have worked beside many of them. There are also bad ones, and that will be another article.
But even the good ones have their own lives, their own firms, their own objectives in working for you. That is normal and it is not a criticism. It is simply the structure of the relationship. They are excellent at what they do, and if you lose, they will be sorry, but they will not carry your loss. You will. Your family will.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. Nobody will ever study your problem with the intensity of the person who has to live with the result.
Then Solve It Fast
I know I am recurrent on this thought, and I repeat it on purpose. Problems are meant to be solved as fast as possible and as pragmatically as possible. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. Solved.
Speed is not the same as haste. Haste is acting before you understand. Speed is refusing to let a problem sit and grow while everyone waits for someone else to move first.
One of the main objectives of this advisory is exactly that. To help you see the full picture of what you are facing, in your own words, and then act to win.
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