Episodes
May 28, 2025
Fixing Sales Before It Bleeds You Dry
Sales problems rarely start loud. They build quietly through messy processes, wishful thinking in the pipeline, the wrong people in key roles, and pricing that no longer makes sense. Maartje van Krieken is joined by Nicholas ...
May 21, 2025
What a Gun in the Face Teaches You
High-stakes decisions don’t reward the loudest voice; they favor the calmest mind and the clearest why. Maartje van Krieken is joined by Jeffrey Owens, a former police officer, FBI-trained hostage negotiator, and executive le...
May 14, 2025
Foresight Unleashed: SCAN Smart!
Most businesses don't fail from bad decisions; they fail because they never saw the storm coming. This episode is a wake-up call for leaders who are too busy managing today to think about what’s coming next. Maartje van Kriek...
May 7, 2025
How to Be a Cybersecurity Porcupine
Most businesses overlook cybersecurity risk management until an attack hits, but small moves like the “porcupine strategy” and multi-factor authentication can be the difference between staying safe and facing a major breach. ...
April 30, 2025
VITALS Matter – Reading People When It Counts
When a crisis hits, the leaders who move fastest aren’t the ones clinging to the org chart. They’re the ones who know exactly who their people really are. In this episode, Maartje van Krieken shares a look at crisis leadershi...
April 23, 2025
Conflict Is Inevitable—How You Respond Isn’t
Conflict doesn’t kill momentum. Our silence around it does. Maartje van Krieken makes a case for why conflict resolution in growing businesses should be a core leadership skill, not something we save for when things get bad. ...
April 16, 2025
Don’t Wait Out Market Chaos—Act Now
When the market tilts without warning, leadership means stepping up even when the chaos wasn’t your fault. What do you do when geopolitical tension, tariffs, or broken supply chains knock your business off course? In this epi...
April 9, 2025
The Danger of Drifting: Why Businesses Fail in Volatile Times
Waiting out the chaos might feel safe, but in business, standing still during a storm is often the fastest way to lose your course entirely. When a crisis hits, why do so many leaders freeze? What makes waiting feel safer tha...
April 2, 2025
Scaling Checkup: Is Your Leadership Fit for the Future?
Most CEOs don’t plan their own exit. What happens when the person who built the company isn’t the right one to scale it? Scott Calderwood joins Maartje van Krieken to talk about CEO transition strategies, scaling leadership c...
March 26, 2025
The Hidden Growth Killer: A Stagnant Team
When your leadership team can’t evolve with your business, scaling challenges become even harder to navigate. How do you know when it’s time to make tough decisions about key positions in your organization? In this episode,...
March 19, 2025
Scaling Smart: Avoiding Investor Fallout
Trust is everything in leadership. Lose it, and investors won’t think twice about making a change. Maartje van Krieken takes a hard look at investor trust in scaling businesses as she breaks down why half of founder-CEOs don’...
March 12, 2025
Scaling Right: The Role of Brand Messaging
Most businesses think they know why customers choose them until they realize they’ve been focusing on the wrong thing all along. Maartje van Krieken sits down with Orly Zeewy for a sharp, no-nonsense look at brand messaging s...
March 5, 2025
Delegation Done Right: Free Up 40% of Your Time Without Losing Control
Most leaders could free up nearly half their workload but refuse to let go. Why is delegation so hard, and what’s the cost of holding on too tightly? Maartje van Krieken unpacks why so many leaders become the bottleneck in th...
Feb. 26, 2025
Growing Pains: The Leadership Shift from Doing to Delegating
Scaling a business comes with big decisions, tough conversations, and the challenge of building a team that can grow with you. How do you know when it’s time to shift roles, implement structure, or step back so others can tak...
Feb. 19, 2025
Avoiding the Fumble: How Leaders Can Make Smarter Calls in Chaos
Hesitation under pressure costs more than a bad decision. This season 2 kick-off episode of The Business Emergency Room unpacks how to make fast, confident calls when the stakes are high. When everything is unfolding fast, ho...
Feb. 14, 2025
Season 2 Trailer
Scaling a business isn’t just about strategy—it’s about navigating chaos, making fast but sound decisions, and keeping teams aligned under pressure. The Business Emergency Room helps leaders, founders, and decision-makers sha...
Feb. 12, 2025
Scaling Without Chaos: Strategies for the Entrepreneur to CEO Transition
In the dynamic world of business growth, the transition from entrepreneur to CEO is often fraught with challenges that can either propel a company forward or lead to burnout. This episode sheds light on the pivotal strategies...
Feb. 5, 2025
Applying Disaster Response Tactics to Business Disruptions
Disruptions are an inevitable part of both life and business, but how we respond to them can make all the difference. In this episode, we explore the structured crisis response strategies used by the Red Cross Disaster Action...
Jan. 29, 2025
The Leadership Formula for Turbulence: Trust, Resilience, and Psychological Safety
Navigating high-pressure situations in the workplace requires more than just strategy—it demands trust, empathy, and a culture of psychological safety. In this episode, Maxine Legal, CEO and founder of Thrive Inclusively, sha...
Jan. 22, 2025
Defusing the Dilemma: How Resourcefulness Solves Big Challenges
What happens when you’re tasked with solving a high-stakes problem you know almost nothing about? This episode of The Business Emergency Room takes you behind the scenes of a fascinating real-life challenge: tackling the unkn...
Jan. 15, 2025
The Human Factor in Corporate Change: Insights from a Critical Incident Stress Management Expert
What if the key to overcoming your organization's toughest challenges lies in understanding the human element? In this compelling podcast episode, psychotherapist Elaine Belson shares her journey from over 30 years in psychot...
Jan. 8, 2025
The Art of Opportunity Framing: Getting Unstuck and Restarting Progress
Feeling overwhelmed by unclear goals or stalled projects? This episode dives into the transformative power of "opportunity framing"—a structured approach to redefine success and realign teams amid chaos. Using Toyota’s 2010 a...
Jan. 1, 2025
The Conflict Cure: Grounding Techniques and Resilience Tools for Leaders
Unlock the secrets to transforming overwhelm into empowerment in a dynamic discussion recorded live at Podapalooza, featuring Robyn McTague, a specialist in team engagement and conflict resolution after 3 decades with WorkSaf...
Dec. 25, 2024
Process Decay: The Silent Killer of Business Efficiency—and How to Fix It
Process Decay is a chronic condition in almost all organizations and can be a significant invisible contributor to overload and turmoil - i.e. Bad Chaos. Do you feel your organization is burdened by inefficiencies that hinder...