Early Warning Signals Quotes

“Most small businesses are built on heroic effort.
Someone always steps up. Someone always pulls through.
That’s admirable — but it’s not scalable.
Heroes burn out.
Heroes leave.
Heroes eventually become the bottleneck.”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals

“A late payment isn’t a crisis if you have 90 days of cash.
A staff departure isn’t catastrophic if you’ve cross-trained your team.
A software crash isn’t fatal if your systems are backed up and redundant.
Risk is always a combination:
Hazard × Vulnerability = Impact”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals

“Many business owners avoid naming their hazards. Not because they don’t know what could go wrong — but because naming it feels like weakness. Like admitting failure. Like inviting bad luck.”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals

“Most business disasters didn’t come out of nowhere.
They came out of inaction.
The warning lights were there.
They just weren’t connected to a system that turned them into a signal.”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals

“Risk is always contextual. What’s a big deal for you might be nothing to someone else.
The real danger is assuming that because you haven’t had a problem yet, you won’t have one soon.”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals

“Most businesses don’t fail because of one catastrophic mistake.
They fail because something important went unnoticed for too long.”
― G. Scott Graham, Early Warning Signals