Business Crisis Plan: Write It in a Calm Week, on One Page
A business crisis plan is one page written in a calm week, before anything breaks. It holds five blocks: your goals in the order you would give them up, a red line for each with its reason, a freeze list, a rule for two reds at once, and a check rhythm. On the bad night you follow it instead of inventing it.
In this article · 6 sections
The best business crisis plan you will ever write gets written on a boring Tuesday. Nothing is on fire. The phone is quiet. Your head is clear.
That is the only day the plan can be any good.
Look around your business. There is a fire extinguisher on the wall and an exit sign over the door. The plan for the night the money runs short lives nowhere. It will be invented at two in the morning, by the most tired version of you.
A plan made up on the worst night is the real crisis. The Jirgenson Model answers it as a control system: goals in order, a red line for each, and regular checks. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).
Why a business crisis plan must exist before the crisis
When the bad news lands, attention narrows to one point and the mind refuses to do sums. Knowledge does not help then. What helps is whatever you wrote down in advance and boiled down to a few steps.
You can look up how to handle a crisis in a small business on the night itself. This page is for a month earlier. Call it a business crisis plan or a small business emergency plan; it fits on one sheet.
A crisis plan written during the crisis is a mood with bullet points.
The one-page plan: five blocks, filled in
Here is the whole page. Each block sits next to an entry from the book's examples: Andrew's coffee shop and Elena, a freelance designer.
1. Your goals, in the order you would give them up
Ask: if things got bad, which goal would I drop first? Which would I defend to the end? Number them.
Above the list, write what is never traded: safety, the law, wages, taxes, loan payments. These are not goals you give up in turn. They decide which moves are allowed at all.
Andrew's order:
| No. | Goal | Target |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cash reserve | at least 2.0 months of expenses |
| 2 | Margin | 15% |
| 3 | Regular customers | 40% of receipts |
| 4 | Quality | no more than 2 complaints a week |
| 5 | Owner's time | no more than 40 hours a week |
He put his own hours last and surprised himself. The reserve came first: without it the shop closes, and then nothing else matters.
2. A red line for each goal, with its reason
The red line business decisions hang on is not a feeling. It is a number, written next to a reason.
Put the line where damage becomes hard to reverse. Andrew drew it for the reserve at one month. His reason: a month gives him time to negotiate a deferral, find money and decide. Below a month, there is no time left for any of that.
| Goal | Red line (emergency) |
|---|---|
| Cash reserve | below 1.0 month |
| Margin | below 5% |
| Regular customers | below 20% |
| Complaints | more than 8 a week |
| Owner's hours | more than 70 a week |
Two rules keep the lines honest. A line cannot be finer than your measurement: if your margin figure is off by a point, a half-point zone means nothing. And you never move a line inside the crisis. That is bending the yardstick to fit the result.
3. A freeze list
Write down what stops the moment any number turns red. Growth moves go first: no growth move starts while a number is red.
On Andrew's first evening with his numbers, the reserve stood at 0.5 months. His first thought was loyalty cards to win customers back. The table said no: the cards cost money, and that money would come out of a reserve already under a month. He put them aside and, for the first time, felt no guilt.
His freeze list, as an illustration: loyalty cards, a second location, any new spending that does not bring the reserve back.
4. A rule for two reds at once
Write the tie-break now. First comes the red that threatens the nearest irreversible damage: judge by timing, scale, probability and how fast the lever acts. Then the red tied to your highest goal.
Elena's case. One client brings in 70% of her income; her red line is 50%. That is red. Then the tax authority freezes her account. Two reds. Income is her goal number one, and the frozen account hits it directly. So the client problem waits, and the account gets everything.
She did not decide that at midnight. The rule decided.
5. A check rhythm and one person to tell
Write when you will look at the numbers again, and what should have changed by then. In a crisis, check the cash more often than usual.
Then name one person you will tell out loud: the fact and one action. Saying the risk with an action attached makes you pull the lever sooner.
Add the three business triage questions for every new problem that lands during the storm. Which goal does it belong to? Which zone is that number in now? Is it more important than what I am doing right now?
That is the page. It takes an evening.
What a cash flow crisis costs without the page
Andrew started with a reserve of 0.5 months against a goal of 2.0. At €27,300 of monthly expenses, that gap is €40,950. His margin sat six points under target: €1,800 of profit missing every month.
At that 9% margin, the reserve reaches two months at month 16. With the margin raised step by step to 15%, it gets there at month 10. Six months of difference.
Those six months matter because of the stability margin: how hard a hit the business can take without crossing a red line. A broken coffee machine is a nuisance for a shop with two months of reserve. For a shop with two weeks, it is an emergency.
Then the bad month came. The supplier raised prices by 8%, a repair was needed, a barista left. With the plan working, the reserve stood at 1.56 months after it: yellow, not red. The same shock at half a month would have been a cash flow crisis.
The human cost is simpler. Without the page, the night before payroll gets decided by fatigue and the loudest phone call.
Where the plan does not reach
The page is complete. It tells you what to do once a number is red, in what order, and what to stop. That treats the symptom: panic and decisions in the order the fires arrive.
It does not touch the cause. The red line still arrives as a surprise, because nothing on the page looks ahead. And when you reach for a lever, the page does not say which ones you can pull yourself, today, and how fast each one works.
Two steps close that gap.
- The list of levers. Three questions for every lever separate the ones you control from the ones you only wish you did. Chapter 5.
- Two forecasts and control by forecast. "If nothing changes" against "if the plan works", in numbers and dates. You see the red line months before you reach it. Chapters 8 and 9.
The plan is one piece of a loop: goals in order, the real state, the gap, levers, plan, forecast.
"My business is different" is the fair objection. The same page works for a coffee shop, a freelancer and a family budget. Only the numbers and their units change.
Key takeaways
- Write the crisis plan in a calm week. One page, five blocks.
- Every red line gets a reason: where damage becomes hard to reverse.
- Freeze growth while any number is red.
- Decide the two-reds rule now: nearest irreversible damage first.
- Never move a red line inside the crisis.
The quiet Tuesday is now
You have two choices. Close this tab and trust that you will think clearly at two in the morning, with the bank on hold and a barista missing. Or take an evening this week and write the page.
The page tells you what to do when the number turns red. The levers and the two forecasts tell you which move works, and warn you months before the red arrives. For the order of moves on the night itself, see what to do first in a business crisis.
Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, with the refusal test. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon. It comes as a Kindle book, with a printable Red Card for the worst day.
Published research
It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:
- Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
- Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
- Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
- GitHub: experiment folder
- Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
- ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552
The full chapter, with every calculation, is in the book.
Buy on AmazonQuestions people ask
What should a business crisis plan include?
Five blocks on one page. Goals in the order you would give them up. A red line for each, with its reason. A freeze list, a rule for two reds at once, and a check rhythm with one person to tell.
When should I write a small business emergency plan?
In a calm week, before anything breaks. Thresholds set inside a crisis bend to fit the result. Set them with a clear head and revise them rarely.
How do I know if a cash flow problem is a crisis?
Measure your reserve in months of expenses, not in euros. If it is below the red line you set in advance, it is a crisis. If you have no line yet, set one now, with its reason.
This topic is covered in Chapter 4, Error: the main signal that drives decisions of Steer, Don't Guess: Setting Priorities, Reading the Numbers and Correcting Course in Business and Life. The numbers in the examples are illustrative; the book states its limits in Appendix G.
Read Chapter 1 free
The Introduction and Chapter 1, with the refusal test, about 9,500 words.