It's a Tuesday. You sit down to open your email and you do a double take. There's an email and it says notice of claim or your account has been suspended or a chargeback has been filed. My stomach would drop. Did your stomach just drop? Because here's the thing. I could have told you that email was landing in your inbox because business moments are predictable, panic is optional, and in the next few minutes, I'm going to give you the five-step move that separates the owners who spiral from the owners who stay calm.
Business fire drills is all about running the drill before the fire breaks out. I'm Tamsen Horton. I'm an attorney and I've been building and running my own online business for 15 years. And in 15 years, I've watched the same handful of fires show up again and again. The refund that turns into a fight. The account you get locked out of. The letter nobody saw coming.
What I really want you to hear is that these fires are not surprises. They catch you by surprise. However, they're predictable. And when something is predictable, it means we can prepare for it. And that is business fire drills.
There are really two ways to meet a fire. You can react. Reacting is the fast email, the quick social media post, the panic, giving a discount you didn't need to give, a 2 a.m. spiraling out of control. Or you can respond. Responding is the opposite. It is calm. It is clear. It's a "here's the next decision you can make with a steady hand." The difference between the two — reacting, 2 a.m. spiral, responding, next clear action — is never talent. It is never the bigger bank account. It is whether you practiced the fire drill before the fire alarm went off.
Think about a fire drill at a school or in a building. They're not learning the exit route during the fire. It is going to happen, hopefully, where it never needs to be run. But they are learning it on a calm day when nothing is burning. So the best time to do a fire drill is before the fire. Hence, business fire drills.
I have put together each one that takes a predictable business alarm and gives you a calm next decision. The fire extinguisher, if you will, in plain English. No legal drama, no fear.
Because I like to organize and color code, every fire drill lives in one of six buckets.
The first bucket is Letter Arrives. That is a client or a customer or a person threatening legally — a cease and desist, a complaint.
Bucket number two is Money on Fire. Think refunds, chargebacks, payment processors holding onto your funds when they shouldn't.
The next bucket is Access Locked. You can't get into your website or your email platform or your social media accounts and you have no idea what to do.
Then IP Under Attack. Someone copies your content or your brand name becomes a problem, or you use someone else's brand and that is a problem — never good.
Then we have Reputation on Fire. A client complaint goes public, or a bad review. Something has happened that is dragging your name and association, your business, through the mud in a way that is detrimental to you and what you're trying to build.
And finally, Compliance, Systems, and Continuity. These are the really boring foundational pieces — the notices, privacy questions, backups that you never made — the pieces that are in place that maintain the foundation and allow you to grow steady, grow without needing to freak out.
As you listen to those, did one of them make your stomach tighten, or kind of go "oh, whoa, didn't think about that"? Hold on to that. I'm going to come back to it in a minute.
Now, Business Fire Drills — I use metaphors. I think in metaphors. I need something easy to remember. As a lawyer, there's all kinds of things I have to remember, in meticulous detail and also in broad strokes. So metaphors are my way of remembering it myself, but more importantly, making it really accessible for you.
Every single fire drill uses the same five letters. DRILL.
D — Don't react. Whatever just landed in your inbox, came across your phone, ran into you at the supermarket, do not answer it in the first hour. We're likely not going to answer it in the first four to six hours, but do not react.
R — Record everything. Ideally you've been doing this all along, you just might not have it organized. Screenshots, dates, messages — save those things. We're going to create folders. You are going to have a record of what you will need before you do anything else. I really like this because in that moment of anxiousness where the emotions are flooding your nervous system, we're going to have a very clear way of taking action, complementing the "don't react."
I — Identify the real risk. What is actually, specifically at stake? Most of the time it is far smaller than your nervous system is telling you.
L — Lead with calm. Your response will sound like a professional. You will articulate what needs to be said, what needs to be done, and you will not be coming across like someone who is in a panicked situation.
L — Lock in the lesson. When it is over, we're going to fix the thing that started the fire. This is one of the most accessible steps as a human, because you can do this in life and you can do it in business. If we know — let's say we had a house fire and it happened because we left a candle burning — we're not going to leave a candle burning anymore. Same exact concept. What was the alarm that we didn't pay attention to? How do we make sure it doesn't come up again? That builds a solid business. It builds a sustainable business. It builds an enjoyable business, because I don't want you to get burned. I don't want your business to get burned. I don't want anything to burn down.
So it's very easy to remember. DRILL. D, don't react. R, record everything. I, identify the real risk. L, lead with calm. L, lock in the lesson.
Now I'm going to walk you through an example. As episodes keep rolling out, we'll go more in depth, but this way you can get a feel for what it looks like applied in a situation that happens frequently. We're going to run through one fire drill start to finish: a chargeback.
Every drill starts with a fire alarm. How do you know when to run a fire drill? When the fire alarm goes off. The fire alarm goes off in my home, I know what to do. In a hotel, I know what to do. In a school, we know what to do.
The fire alarm for a chargeback is a notification in your email, from the payment processor. A customer has disputed a payment with their bank. Your funds are going to get frozen and you have a deadline to respond. They're also going to tell you about fees that start triggering based on how you respond. Usually there is no warning at all. The alarm — boom — in the email, and it is going off.
Reacting means you fire off an angry email to the customer, or you post on social media or a story. Newsflash: that does not help your case at all. And you probably aren't even sure what evidence you're allowed to submit.
Responding means you already know what to do. You have run this drill. You know what to do step by step when a chargeback lands in your inbox.
D — Do not react. If you need to close the computer, go for a walk, yell and scream into the air, go for it. Do not post anything publicly or internally just yet.
R — Record everything. Now is when we take action. Pull the file, pull the receipt, open the customer's account in your system. Every message that's been exchanged, any emails, access to product, screenshots of a DM — pull all of it into an organized folder (I use Google Drive, but any system works). We're giving our nervous system something to do, and it's also what your attorney would tell you to do. We are not posting. We are not putting anything out there that could be used against us.
I — Identify the real risk. Is this fraud? That does happen. Or is this a frustrated customer who didn't know a refund was an option, or how to contact you? Those are two different problems.
L — Lead with calm. Your response to the payment processor will read like a professional who has done this before — because you have. You ran the drill. You have your response prepared. You know the fees being assessed, whether it's Stripe, PayPal, or a different processor.
L — Lock in the lesson. If chargebacks keep happening, the fix is upstream. In 15 years of business, I have not had a chargeback, and I don't have many clients who have. When your business is legally buttoned up, chargebacks aren't a recurring "oh my gosh" moment. Your checkout language, your refund policy, your marketing — fix it upstream, and it stops coming downstream.
Here is your fire extinguisher. A fire extinguisher puts out the fire — if you're already in it, you might need more, a bigger capacity, but it puts out the fire. Here's what you build before the fire: clear terms at checkout, a paper/digital trail on every delivery, a refund policy people can actually see before they buy.
If you're in the middle of the fire: send the prepared response to the payment processor. Clear, clearly labeled screenshots with a solid naming convention, links to your purchase terms, links to what was agreed upon. If things are missing, you'll know what to take responsibility for and what not to. (Same advice I give my teenage driver: if you get in an accident, you keep your mouth shut.)
That is a fire drill. At this point you have three options. Option one: do nothing — because you've already done this, you have the system and the prepared responses in place, you know your naming conventions, you know exactly what to do. Option two: run the drill and put it in place this week. Option three: you're thinking of a friend who needs this right now — send them this episode.
Any of those is a valid choice. One of them keeps you calm and keeps your business from getting burned.
I'm going to walk you through all of the fire drills. Many fires are actually made up of two to five fire drills — two or more things happening at once, and how you handle them, in which order, is what keeps you calm, articulate, and running your business and your life without it being a problem.
We'll keep running through them: refund requests that get bigger than they should, what to do if you lose access to your accounts, what a cease and desist letter actually means, what trademark infringement means. Every single fire drill, same five steps. D, don't react. R, record everything. I, identify the real risk. L, lead with calm. L, lock in the lesson.
Thank you for listening to this. Your business says thank you for listening to this. Now — tell me, which one of the fires I've mentioned would wreck your week the most? Drop it in the comments below. And if you've lived through one and would like to share, please — the wisdom that comes from our collective experience is incredibly valuable. I will read your comment. I will start a conversation with you.
Until our next fire drill: remember, business moments are predictable. Your panic is optional. Run the fire drill before the fire alarm goes off.
