Heather Wright gave a talk on resilience and performing under pressure at the CIMA Members in Practice Conference last weekend. One line stayed with me: we do not rise to the level of our intentions, we fall to the level of our practice. The habits you keep when nothing is at stake are the ones that surface when everything is. Resilience is not summoned in the moment. It is whatever you have already been doing, made visible.
She was speaking about people, but a business runs on practice too. A business’s practice is the processes and systems it actually uses week to week. That is what it falls back on when conditions turn, whatever the plan set out to do.
A tailwind flatters everyone. The headwind is where you find out whether the preparation was real, or only intended. A business does not get to decide that in the moment. When a supplier price jumps, a core channel softens, or peak season lands heavier on cash than the forecast allowed, the founder falls to the practices already in place. If the management accounts are months behind and no one has modelled what a bad quarter does to the runway, the response has to be built from scratch, at the worst possible time to be building anything.
The practices that make a business resilient are unglamorous and mostly invisible. A monthly close that is accurate and on time. A rolling cash forecast that looks far enough ahead to give a warning rather than a verdict. Channel and product margins understood well enough to price a move deliberately. A view of what the business looks like under a softer scenario, drawn up before there is any reason to need it.
None of these feel urgent in a good month, and the reason they slip is rarely a shortage of discipline. Heather Wright’s framing was that every habit pays a reward, and the old way pays one quietly. An accurate close can hand you an answer you would rather not read yet, and a forecast you never build cannot tell you no. Her other point was that the change happens at the cue, the single recurring moment where a practice is run or skipped, which is why a completed monthly close on time matters more than the intention to get to it. These are the financial version of the habit practised in private.
By the time the headwind arrives, the question of whether a business is resilient has largely been answered. The work I care about is helping founders put those practices in place during the quiet months, so that when a hard quarter comes they are reading from a clear picture instead of scrambling to find one. Resilience is mostly the practices you kept before you needed them.
Phoenix Advisory is an advisory-led accountancy practice providing Portfolio FD support to founder-led UK Ltd businesses, primarily health-optimisation brands in e-commerce, and a small number of selective professional services firms. We help founders build the clarity, stability and momentum to scale profitably while designing the life behind the business. Where it helps, we also provide compliance services, so founders work with one team rather than coordinating three. Every engagement begins with a free thirty-minute Discovery Call.
A free 30-minute Discovery Call. No obligation, no sales pressure.