There are two distinct types of crippling challenges in business.  The first is devastating:  something is wrong and you can’t find the right answer.  And while business still goes on, the problem threatens to unravel some well-made plans.

The second is more immediate and even more dangerous:  the business killer!

Our fledgeling quilted cot cover business was humming right along when the business killer swooped down on us. 

Seems the vinyl lining we were using in our beautiful covers was causing some of our clients problems.  Further investigation showed that each new shipment of vinyl was more brittle than the last.  Worse still, several old clients who had bought from us years before were reporting that their vinyl linings were splitting from wear, cracking in the cold or falling out in the wash.

And while we only warrantied our covers for 180 days after order, I still knew that we’d be getting more calls regarding the lining.

Could we have ignored the problems and continued making the inferior covers?  Of course.  But that would mean creating hundreds of dissatisfied customers every year.  We couldn’t afford to alienate our past customers and we couldn’t afford to replace all the old covers we’d sold, especially if we just replaced them with covers that would fail again.

I spent a few terror-filled nights (the kind where you get into bed, stare at the ceiling for eight hours, then get out of bed) and finally hit upon the solution:  we’d find a stronger lining for our covers, we’d replace any warrantied covers with new ones and we’d offer a discount to anyone who owned one of our original covers.

Finding a new lining turned out to be more simple than expected.  The new material, a treated nylon that is washer and drier safe and won’t melt like vinyl, is more expensive.  And while we’ve tripled our materials cost for lining, we’ve also added years of durability to our lining and made our covers many times more attractive than the alternatives.

We replaced quite a few covers during those first months.  But we also doubled sales, as folks who had hesitated to buy a vinyl-lined cover because they were worried about durability decided to take a chance on our great product.

Still others were so pleased that we fixed their problem and offered a better solution, they ordered more covers to augment what they already had.

 And because our covers are so strong now, we’ve upped our warranty to a full year and we offer a 90-day money-back return on all orders.

What started as a threat to our small company turned into the second best change (right after selling to retail customers) we ever made.

I know, some of the replacements we sent will last quite a few years longer than the originals, meaning we’ll sell less covers to those firms.  But we’ve only sold to a fraction of the 22,000 funeral homes in the United States.  It didn’t make sense to ruin our fledgeling good name by not standing behind our product.

And since our goal is to make quilted cot covers the industry standard (we’re trying to replace those ugly fake fur covers and the corduroy ones that have no character or class) we’ve got to be a reputable and remarkable company.

So far, we’ve been both.  But we could have very well ended up like this: