When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Don’t squeeze them, sweeten them, or start a small-batch organic lemonade brand.

Freeze the lemon and shove it as far back up life as you can. Elbow deep.

Because in business, you don’t win by coping, you win by counterattacking.

Most people have been trained to absorb problems politely. They call it “resilience.” They think if they just keep calm, manage through, and “control what they can control,” the storm will pass. That’s survival thinking. And survival thinking kills growth.

Every major business success story was built in a storm, not under a rainbow. The best operators I’ve ever worked with don’t endure downturns, they weaponise them. They use adversity to reset markets, rewrite contracts, and reposition competitors.

When a recession hits, they buy brands they couldn’t afford last year.
When interest rates rise, they renegotiate debt while everyone else is panicking.
When costs inflate, they rebuild the model so the margin gap never reopens.
When the team complains about the pressure, they build systems that mean they’ll never need that level of headcount again.

That’s how value creation really works. Not through optimism, but through ruthless adaptation.

Private equity is full of stories like this. The operator who turned a distressed retail chain into a logistics play. The CEO who took a cost crisis and rebuilt pricing around perceived value. The founder who turned a loss-making channel into the highest-margin digital funnel in the business. None of them “managed through.” They attacked through.

There’s a quiet kind of violence in business that few people talk about......the ability to turn pain into a permanent advantage. To make the market regret ever putting you under pressure.

When life gives you lemons, make it wish it hadn’t.