Smart leadership is crucial to any business going through the series of peaks and valleys I call the Business Storm Cycle; the Tornado of rapid growth and expansion, followed by the Avalanche period of fast deceleration, which is followed by the consolidation phase. Without a steady hand at the helm, even the best employees can become burned out and dispirited – and the company may flounder, or even fail.

Jim Crane is a good example of a business leader who has done this multiple times. He’s gone around and around the business cycle, and each time, he’s managed to successfully reinvent himself into a new Tornado.

In 2000, he renamed his company Eagle Global Logistics (reflecting the fact that by then his company was doing business in more than a hundred countries around the world). Then, in 2007, the company was bought by Apollo Management—but just a year later, Crane bought back his company and reinvented it once again. He opened Crane Worldwide Logistics with a group of former senior Eagle Global Logistics executives, and Crane Worldwide grew to more than $680 million in revenues. The company website states that they are “convinced that superior people coupled with game-changing technology,” along with the best of current processes, have the ability to transform their industry.

Redefining an old company is a difficult task, but Crane’s team embraces the challenge. He brings the same team back together every time to do it because by now they know exactly how to do this. They’re very clean and very quick about it because they’ve all worked together so many times.

This crack team has gone through the business cycle over and over—so many times, in fact, that now they are reinventing themselves constantly. As a result, they’ve become the logistics leader in the country, and today they’re almost seamless in the way they handle transition points. No one on the outside would even know that the company is in the process of transforming. Crane’s company proves that it’s possible to successfully navigate the business cycle!

Let me help your company navigate the peaks and valleys of the Business Storm Cycle. Contact me today.