Episode 115

No One Sends Your Business a Reminder; So Here It Is

Q4 has a way of exposing every business vulnerability you hoped could wait until next year.

Most leaders know where the weak spots are. The team is already tired.A key person holds too much responsibility or critical knowledge. A strategic issue keeps showing up on the agenda without getting resolved. A major client or supplier relationship has gone too long without a meaningful conversation. The real question is whether you address those warning signs now or wait for Q4 pressure to expose them for you.

In this conversation, Maartje van Krieken shares seven practical checks leaders can use to assess how prepared their business really is for the final quarter of the year. Think of them as a preventative health check for your organization. Where is your capacity thinner than it appears? Which parts of the business depend too heavily on one person? What problem needs fresh eyes? And what conversation does everyone know needs to happen before year end?

Resilience comes from catching signals early enough to act. You do not need to tackle all seven checks at once. Maartje suggests choosing the three that make you most uncomfortable and starting there.

If something went seriously wrong in your business in the next 90 days, would you see it coming soon enough to respond?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 How to Prepare Your Business for Q4

03:22 Check Employee Capacity and Burnout Risk

05:15 Identify Key Person Risk in Your Business

06:20 Address Stalled Strategic Priorities

08:03 Use Fresh Perspectives to Solve Business Problems

10:10 Strengthen Strategic Client and Supplier Relationships

13:38 Review Cash Reserves and Financial Risk

15:50 Have the Leadership Conversations You’ve Been Avoiding

18:31 Choose Your Top Three Business Resilience Priorities

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.