The Worst Two Weeks of My Business Life

In the spring of 1990, before e-mail, Twitter and instant messaging, if you were going to get information quickly it came by phone. This has led to a favorite saying, “You’re only one phone call from disaster.”

For me, my business disaster started with a phone call from a client of my food service company in Vermont. The client told me about an employee who had just become sick after eating some food from our vending machine. I didn’t believe it. We made 13,000 pieces of food a week and had been doing so for years. Never in all of that time had our food made anyone ill.

I continued on with my day and then the phone rang again. This was a second client calling to say that an employee had become sick. Now, I started to worry. This was not going to be a good day. When the third call came, I knew I had a problem.

These phone calls were a harbinger of a huge problem. It was the beginning of the worst two weeks in my business career. The problem was so bad that I knew that if we did not handle it well, we would be out of business.

Most food businesses do not survive a breakout of salmonella food-borne illness. That was what I was dealing with. This was a problem that was about to grow and involve all our operations in four cities in two states, covering more than 40 accounts.

I knew I had to do two things. First, I had to contact all of our clients that had food machines. Second, I had to call my insurance agent and get him on board with our plans quickly.

I knew these were the first two things I needed to do because our management team had thought about this issue during one of our strategic planning sessions. Every year we spent a couple of hours talking about the really bad things that could happen to our business. Our big three were an armed robbery in our facility or with a route driver; the death or serious injury of someone caused by one of our vehicles; or the biggie, a food-borne illness.

Unfortunately, we got the biggie, the food-borne illness. Those three phone calls started us down a road that we had thought about but never in a million years thought we would ever have to take.

Here is what happened. The commissary manager who ran our food production facility decided he was going to help us save some money. He decided that we could substitute ground turkey for ground beef. He never bothered to tell me. He just made the change.

The problem with using ground turkey is it needs to handled much more carefully than ground beef. In 1990, most of the ground turkey you could buy had salmonella in it. If you didn’t cook and handle it properly, you could get sick. We did not handle it properly and 27 people became ill.

After about four hours, more bad news came rolling in. The health department descended on our facility. We abruptly went from having a rating of 96 percent two weeks earlier to one in the low 30 percent range. This caused our food production facility to be closed down.

The local news media decided we were the top story of the day. We had reporters and television news trucks outside our warehouse, all wanting a story. If we could not provide them with some information, we knew they would have only one side of the story to report.

I had to get our insurance company on board and I needed to personally call all of the companies that we had supplied with infected food. I decided the first call had to be to our insurance agent, Peter Prescott from Cool Insuring Agency. Mr. Prescott turned out to be my personal star over the next two weeks. He personally took over all of the claims and spoke with anyone who had been infected and their families. He assured all of the people who became sick that they would be taken care of and insurance would cover it.

My job was to take responsibility for what our company had done. I called all of our clients and explained what had happened. I told them that this was our fault. We had handled the food improperly. I told our clients that we would make sure anyone who became sick would be dealt with fairly. I asked for our clients’ help in identifying anyone who could have become sick from the food we sold.

Our next step was to post notices at all our clients that we had sold tainted food. We asked that anyone who had become sick or thought they might have become sick to contact us. We did not try to duck our problem. We did not try to blame anyone else or justify our behavior. We had decided during our strategic planning sessions that being truthful was the only way to go.

While our nightmare went on I received several calls from friends in the industry. Bad news travels quickly and many friends called to offer support. There was only one problem with their support. They kept talking about damage control. That was the last thing in my mind. My thoughts kept going to how to communicate our problems and how to make sure that those who became sick were treated fairly.

As it turned out, my thought process was the correct one. We took responsibility for what happened. We communicated clearly about what the issues were. We asked for help in identifying those who might have become sick. We got our insurance company on board. I personally talked with all our food clients and kept talking with them during the crisis.

The combination of all of the things we did helped us stay in business. We did not lose a single client. We had an opportunity to walk our talk. We had unbelievable help from Mr. Prescott and Cool Insuring Agency. All of these things helped us learn seven lessons:

• Telling the truth is always the best way to go.
• Don’t hide from your problems. Bring them out in the open.
• Ask for help and ask quickly when things go wrong.
• Be responsible for what your company and you do. No excuses allowed.
• Plan for the worst things that can happen. You never know when your nightmare might come true.
• Learn from your mistakes and let those affected know what you have done to change.
• Be transparent in what you are doing and what you are thinking.

I believe these seven things helped us stay in business. I think the most important step we took was to hold the situation-planning exercises. Having a salmonella breakout is not something I would recommend as a character-building exercise, but I had real proof that thinking about what could go wrong is an important step in keeping a company healthy.

What were the worst two weeks in your business life? What lessons did you learn?

Josh Patrick is a founder and principal at Stage 2 Planning Partners, where he works with private business owners on creating personal and business value.