When a deal collapses, tell your team the same day
Jessica Christiansen-Franks lost $1.2 million of committed revenue in three days. Every adviser told her not to tell the team. She did anyway.
Eight months into rebuilding Neighbourlytics for self-service, Jess Christiansen-Franks had $1.4 million of committed revenue on the books. Over three days in February 2024, $1.2 million of it fell through - purchase orders signed, projects underway, gone. She had twenty staff, about four weeks of payroll left, and a three-day all-team strategy offsite starting the following Monday.
The advice was universal, and she ignored it
Every adviser she spoke to told her the same thing: don't tell the team, not yet. The instinct makes sense - panic is contagious, and a founder's job is partly to absorb uncertainty so the team doesn't have to carry it. Jess did the opposite. She sat everyone down at lunchtime on the Friday and told them what had happened, and that she'd likely have to give four weeks' notice.
What transparency actually bought her
The team didn't walk. They worked the four weeks out, some of them coming in on weekends they didn't need to, while she reframed the offsite around making the business sellable in that window instead of running it as planned. She still calls them her closest friends. The risk with hiding bad news isn't just that it comes out eventually - it's that the people who could help solve it are the last to find out there's a problem to solve.
The line she had to hold
Transparency wasn't the same as dumping the problem on the team to manage. She stayed the one making the calls - fielding the bank, triaging what could still be saved - while being honest about where things stood. Measured risk, not an open floodgate: tell people enough that they can act, not so much that they're managing your crisis for you.