A few weeks ago I stood in front of my sales team and told them I was changing our commission structure.
Ceiling goes down. Floor goes up. Instead of chasing a big ceiling that almost nobody hits in a market like this, everyone now earns a commission on their monthly portfolio whether they close or not.
Some of them were surprised. Salespeople love the big ceiling. But I told them the truth: this is a down year. Not just for us. Not just for our industry. For businesses worldwide.
Since the strikes on Iran last February, oil blew past $100 a barrel. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz got choked. Inflation is eating everyone’s margins. Clients are freezing budgets. Deals that used to close in three weeks now take three months. If they close at all.
I’ve been in business for 16 years. I’ve been through down years before. And every single one of them taught me the same lesson:
Down years are building years.
In software, we have a term called technical debt. You ship fast, you take shortcuts, you promise yourself you’ll clean up the code later. The product works. Customers are happy. Money is coming in. But underneath, the shortcuts pile up. And one day, the interest comes due. That’s the same idea behind why systems beat heroics.
Your business has technical debt too. And most of it is not in your code.
Think about what happens in the good years. All your attention goes to the front end. Sales. Marketing. Closing. Delivery. That’s where the money is, so that’s where you are. Nothing wrong with that. When the harvest is ripe, you harvest.
But while you’re out front, your back end gets left behind. Contracts you haven’t reviewed in years. Receivables piling up because nobody owns collections. An org chart that grew by accident instead of by design. Processes that live in one employee’s head. Failsafes you never built because you never needed them. I’ve seen how costly that can be in posts like One CC Is Not Permission and I Almost Lost a Deal Because of One Unsent Email.
None of that hurts you when money is flowing.
All of it hurts you when money stops.
I was talking with a founder I invest in recently. Seven years into the business. I asked for the org chart. The receivables. The collection rate. The employment contracts. There was almost nothing to show me. Seven years of chasing the front end, and the back end was never built.
I don’t blame him. I told him: these are the tuition fees you pay as an entrepreneur. You’re going to pay them either way. The only question is whether you learn from the class.
Here’s why the boring back-end work matters. Years ago, in a quiet season, I put provisions in our contracts that I never once had to use. They just sat there. Failsafes. Then a legal battle came, and those boring provisions became the thing standing between my company and a devastating loss. It’s the same kind of lesson I wrote about in What Happens When the Piano Falls on You.
You build failsafes when things are quiet. By the time you need one, it’s too late to build it.
I’ve been going through the Bible again in my quiet time, and lately it’s Joseph who keeps standing out to me.
God showed him seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. The whole strategy was simple: use one season to prepare for the other. Egypt didn’t survive the famine because of what they did during the famine. They survived because of what Joseph built before it.
The famine didn’t create Joseph’s wisdom. It revealed it.
Proverbs 24:27 says it plainly: “Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.”
There is an order to building well. The field before the house. The back end before the front end.
Ecclesiastes says there is a season for everything. We love quoting that in the good times. We forget it means the lean times are for something too.
If this season feels heavy, that may be exactly the point. This is the season to build the thing that will carry you later. I’ve also talked about that kind of hard pruning in The Tough Choices Behind Our Sugar Farm Liquidation.
So if you’re leading a business through 2026, here’s my challenge to you.
Stop measuring this year against last year’s revenue. Ask a different question instead: when the market turns — and it always turns — will your back end be able to carry the weight of the next good years?
Fix your contracts. Chase your receivables. Draw your org chart on purpose this time. Document what’s living in people’s heads. Build the failsafes you hope you’ll never use. Take care of the people who are grinding through this with you.
The entrepreneurs who come out of this stronger won’t be the ones who sold the hardest into the storm. They’ll be the ones who used the storm to build.
Down years are building years.
Build.
