A stolen SUV rammed into my family’s convenience store yesterday and took the ATM full of cash.
Less than two hours later, the store was back up and running.
(Most people know me for LeanSuite, but a crisis in the family business is a rapid stress test of everything I teach about operations.)
The glass was shattered. The machine was gone. The vehicle was left abandoned right on the site.
But the team didn't freeze. The perimeter was immediately secured, communication flowed exactly where it needed to go, and we recovered in 120 minutes.
Nobody was hurt yesterday, which is the only metric that actually matters.
But a crisis like this does more than just prove your resilience. It usually exposes every single vulnerability you didn't know you had.
When the dust settles, the illusion of control drops. The weak links in your physical security and your operational processes become glaringly obvious.
Recovering the store in two hours was just the initial response. The actual work is what happens next:
1. Immediate: Boarding up the broken doors and windows, cleaning the glass, getting the floor organized, and reopening the doors.
2. Short-term: Getting the physical damage fully repaired and bringing the store back to its baseline condition.
3. Long-term: Rethinking the structural layout and our operational design so this rarely has a chance to happen again.
True operational excellence isn't just for the manufacturing floor, and it isn't just about how fast you recover when things violently break.
It is usually about what you choose to do with the vulnerabilities the chaos just exposed.
Less than two hours later, the store was back up and running.
(Most people know me for LeanSuite, but a crisis in the family business is a rapid stress test of everything I teach about operations.)
The glass was shattered. The machine was gone. The vehicle was left abandoned right on the site.
But the team didn't freeze. The perimeter was immediately secured, communication flowed exactly where it needed to go, and we recovered in 120 minutes.
Nobody was hurt yesterday, which is the only metric that actually matters.
But a crisis like this does more than just prove your resilience. It usually exposes every single vulnerability you didn't know you had.
When the dust settles, the illusion of control drops. The weak links in your physical security and your operational processes become glaringly obvious.
Recovering the store in two hours was just the initial response. The actual work is what happens next:
1. Immediate: Boarding up the broken doors and windows, cleaning the glass, getting the floor organized, and reopening the doors.
2. Short-term: Getting the physical damage fully repaired and bringing the store back to its baseline condition.
3. Long-term: Rethinking the structural layout and our operational design so this rarely has a chance to happen again.
True operational excellence isn't just for the manufacturing floor, and it isn't just about how fast you recover when things violently break.
It is usually about what you choose to do with the vulnerabilities the chaos just exposed.