Business owners know these kinds of Mondays happen to everyone. But you were not prepared for this one. Only hour into the day, your main assistant calls in sick. Next, a shipment arrives for a hot project that is due tomorrow. Not only is the product not what you ordered, but the replacement product is three days away. So you send the production crew off for the day, only to find out that the truck will not start. You discover that no one has checked the oil in that truck for months, and most likely the engine is fried. Next you get the mail and discover you forgot to pay your federal taxes on time. The fine just sucked the rest of the profit from your entire month.  You do what every self-respecting entrepreneur would do.

You have a hissy fit.

But never fear. Here comes Aunt Mona Lott. Like Paris Stroika, she is another family member that is holding you back–just in a very specious way. She keeps you from achieving your best by the very thing she does best: sympathy. Her sympathy oozes from her every pore, she strokes your ego and soothes your every frustration. There there there, days like this should never happen to you. She reminds you how very smart you are, and that you are suffering for other people’s mistakes. The mean ol’ world is simply out to get you. None of this is your fault. Stamping her foot in your honor, she convinces you that you are the victim of stupid people.

These kinds of days do indeed happen to every entrepreneur. After the standard hissy fit, you have two responses:

You can choose to accept Aunt Mona Lott’s sympathy. Not recommended. Aunt Mona Lott keeps you in victim mode, and living forever in Crisis Town. If you listen to her, you will miss one of the most important opportunities in the life of your business–the opportunity to turn a really bad day into some really good days later.

Your second choice is to stop pointing fingers and become a leader. Sure, as the song says, some days are diamonds and others are rocks. But every bad day is an opportunity to build a system to ensure that these problems will never happen again.

Stop passing the buck and take ownership of your business. Seek and annihilate the recurring monkey on your back by converting them into fool-proof systems. Because what is really stupid is to experience the same monkey over and over and do nothing to get rid of it.

Ah, the power of a bad day! This kind of pressure can turn your rocks into diamonds.

In the 26 years that we have been helping small companies with their marketing and advertising, we have seen almost every kind of difficulty one can imagine. Throughout this month, we are sharing some of the most common problems using fictitious characters in a humorous way. While all of the details in these stories are true, the names have been changed, to protect the guilty. Should any of the stories sound familiar, it is our desire that they would help steer you around some pitfalls. Stay tuned for more Complex Characters of Capitalism.