“I need you to realize that if your business fails in this environment, it’s not on you.”
Those are the comforting words of Ken Clark, founder and practice director of Chenal Family Therapy in Little Rock, which operates 15 counseling clinics from Jonesboro to Texarkana. In an interview with Arkansas Business last week, Clark encouraged business executives to open up — to “get vulnerable” — during the unprecedented and still unpredictable coronavirus pandemic.
Clark, like all therapists, believes in the power of talk therapy even in the best of times, sometimes comparing it to the inevitability of seeing a dentist. “You can go for checkups or for a root canal,” he said. “I think that’s true with leaders and vulnerability. The wrong time to learn whether I can open up is when I can’t make payroll.”
But this crisis, impacting every business at the same time, “may be one of the best times I’ve ever seen when the vulnerability may come without too much prodding,” he said.
The publishers of dozens of business journals across the country have been holding teleconferences once a week for a month, sharing ideas for revenue preservation and offering each other moral support. Some Arkansas Business readers may have a similar sympathetic sounding board and the sense to use it.
If you don’t, it’s time to find an outlet — and that can’t be the employees who are looking to you for their own financial and emotional stability. It really is lonely at the top.
“No. 1,” Clark said, “recognize that you are not alone.”
Whether you are running a tiny business or a giant one, you have been dealt a hand that no one knows for sure how to play. If you make it through, it may be as much luck as skill. Same if you don’t.