How To Manage Your Business During an Extended Personal Crisis

Plan for the unplannable

Joe Procopio
6 min readSep 19, 2022
image by pvproductions

I’m not gonna sugar coat it. Last month was a pretty bad month for me.

On top of the normal day-to-day business problems, my personal life took an unexpected turn when my wife took a spill on the tennis court, broke her wrist, and required two back-to-back surgical procedures of the “it has to be done now” variety.

It’s selfish of me to think about how her misfortune and pain impacts my day-to-day. But it’s also a reality, and an inescapable one at that.

The fact is, when she went down, I got handed another job, and this one was far more important, far more difficult, and far more time-consuming than the one I already had. It’s basically the 24/7 running of a household with three kids, two of which are at the high-effort point of making a decision about college that will dictate the next four years of their life and maybe their future.

I make no bones about it. I can’t do what I do unless she does what she does. All in all it could have been a lot worse, but it wasn’t nothing. And that’s my point.

The Sneaky Extended Time Blip

We all have accidents. We all get hit with unforeseen circumstances that — in the back of our minds —…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com