10 Ways Businesses Survive During Wartime
If you have ever asked how businesses survive during wartime, the honest answer is: not by luck. War does
If you have ever asked how businesses survive during wartime, the honest answer is: not by luck. War does not care about your business plan. It does not wait for your quarterly review. It hits, and from that moment, everything changes. Supply chains break. Customers disappear. Buildings get destroyed. Employees leave to fight or flee.
But here is the thing: businesses have survived war before. Not just big corporations with resources, but small factories, family shops, and individual entrepreneurs. They survived because they made smart decisions under pressure.
Here are ten of those decisions, with the real stories behind them.
1. Stop Making What Nobody Needs. Start Making What the War Needs.
This is the most important move a business can make in wartime. The market changes overnight. What sold well yesterday may have no buyers tomorrow.
The smartest businesses do not wait to see if demand comes back. They look at what the war actually needs and move toward it.
The story: In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Maria Masliy had spent seven years building her shoe brand, Marsala. She made premium women’s shoes: heels, loafers, fashion footwear. After the invasion, she evacuated to Amsterdam. Nobody was buying fashion shoes. Then she received a message from a Ukrainian woman who had spent weeks in a cold air raid shelter wearing a donated pair of Marsala outdoor boots. That message changed her direction. Masliy found a factory that had relocated from Kharkiv to western Ukraine and started developing a military boot called the MARS. It weighed 1,360 grams, far lighter than the standard 3 kg army boot. She went from designing stilettos to equipping soldiers. Her business survived.
The bigger example: In 1941, Ford Motor Company stopped making cars completely. Its factory at Willow Run in Michigan was converted to build B-24 Liberator bombers. At first, production was slow and critics called it “Will It Run.” But by 1944, Ford had worked out the system, and a finished B-24 rolled off the line every 63 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By the end of the war, the plant had produced over 8,600 bombers.
The lesson: The first thing to understand about how businesses survive during wartime is this: ask yourself what the new environment needs, not what you used to be good at.
2. Move Your Business Before You Lose It
Location feels permanent until the bombs start falling. Businesses that stay in dangerous areas out of habit, loyalty, or denial often lose everything. The smarter move is to relocate before the situation becomes impossible.
The story: When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet government faced a problem. Most of their heavy industry was in western regions directly in the path of the German advance. So they did something extraordinary. From July to November 1941, they packed up over 1,500 large factories, loaded them onto trains, and moved them east to the Ural Mountains and Siberia. Workers and their families went with the machinery. In some cases, production restarted in the open air before a building was even built around the equipment. The workers at one steel plant in Chelyabinsk were given 75 days to restart production. They did it in 56, working around the clock in freezing conditions, living in tents. By 1942, the Soviet Union was out-producing Germany in tanks.
In Ukraine in 2022, the same logic played out at smaller scale. The Ukrainian government launched a relocation program in March 2022, offering free transport for equipment, subsidized premises, and help with utilities. By July 2022, 678 companies had relocated to safer western regions, with 68 percent of them having already restarted production.
The lesson: Your building is not your business. Your people and your capabilities are. Move them.
3. Plan in Weeks, Not Years
In normal times, businesses plan 1, 3, or 5 years ahead. In wartime, that is useless. The situation changes too fast. A plan made in January may be completely irrelevant by March.
Businesses that survived the early months of conflict were the ones that shortened their planning window dramatically and focused only on the most urgent decisions.
The story: After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, McKinsey researchers studied how Ukrainian businesses responded. They found that the companies which survived the initial shock had almost all abandoned medium and long-term planning entirely. Most could not project further than two to three weeks. They made decisions based on what they knew right now, delegated more authority to branch offices so they did not become bottlenecks, and kept checking back on their assumptions constantly. The companies that tried to maintain their normal planning processes locked themselves into decisions that were outdated before they could be executed.
The lesson: In a crisis, the ability to make fast decisions beats the ability to make perfect ones. Shorten your horizon and keep moving.
4. Cut Your Costs Early, Not Late
Most business owners wait to see if things improve before cutting costs. In wartime, that instinct is expensive. By the time it becomes obvious that you need to cut, you may have already burned through the cash you needed to survive.
The story: Ukrainian business owners who kept their companies running through 2022 often describe making decisions that would have felt extreme in peacetime. Some founders voluntarily stopped taking their own salaries in the first weeks of the invasion to preserve payroll for their teams. Others dropped entire product lines without the usual analysis, because there was no time for it. The question they kept asking was simple: if our revenue drops to zero, how many weeks can we keep paying people? The businesses that calculated that number early and acted on it bought themselves the time to adapt. The ones that treated the crisis as temporary ran out of runway before they could figure out a new direction.
The lesson: Calculate your survival window now. Then do what you need to do to extend it.
5. Never Depend on One Customer, One Market, or One Product
This is one of the most overlooked factors in how businesses survive during wartime. Businesses that have all their revenue coming from one source are one bad event away from collapse. In wartime, bad events happen constantly.
The story: McKinsey documented a Ukrainian company that, years before the 2022 invasion, had made a deliberate policy of capping revenue from any single market at 15 percent of total sales. It was an unusual rule. Most businesses do not think that way. But when the invasion hit and domestic demand in Ukraine collapsed, this company had existing relationships with customers in multiple countries. It redirected sales across those markets and absorbed the shock. Competitors who had depended heavily on Ukrainian domestic customers had nowhere to turn. They were trying to build international relationships from scratch in the middle of a crisis.
The lesson: Diversification feels unnecessary when times are good. It feels essential when times are not.
6. Go Digital, Because Physical Things Can Be Destroyed
Offices can be bombed. Warehouses can burn. Physical infrastructure is a vulnerability in a conflict zone. Businesses with digital operations can keep running even when their buildings cannot.
The story: Ukrainian businesses that had already moved their operations to cloud systems before the 2022 invasion had a significant advantage over those that had not. When offices in eastern and southern Ukraine became unusable, digitized businesses could keep processing payroll, communicating with clients, and running operations from anywhere. They used Starlink connections for internet access in areas with damaged infrastructure. Companies that had not digitized were forced to do so in a crisis, which is far harder, more expensive, and slower than doing it in advance. Metro Ukraine, a retail chain, maintained supply operations and continued providing food to civilians and the military despite extreme logistical disruption, partly because its supply chain systems allowed for flexible rerouting.
The lesson: Physical operations have physical risks. If your business can operate digitally, build that capability before you need it.
7. Pivot to Government Contracts If You Can
Governments at war spend enormous amounts of money. A large portion of that spending flows to private businesses. Knowing what is being purchased and positioning yourself to supply it can be the difference between thriving and closing.
The story: During World War II, a small manufacturing company in Waterbury, Connecticut called Mattatuck Manufacturing had spent years making upholstery nails. Furniture nails. When the war came, they looked at what the government needed and made a change. They switched production to cartridge clips for Springfield rifles. Within a short time, they were producing three million clips per week. Another Waterbury company, Chase Brass and Copper, produced more than 50 million cartridge cases and mortar shells, and eventually made components for the atomic bomb. These were not defense companies. They were everyday manufacturers who looked at what the war needed and moved toward it.
The lesson: Government contracts are not only for large defense firms. Find out what is being bought and whether you can supply any part of it.
8. Find International Customers Before Your Home Market Collapses
War shrinks domestic economies. Unemployment rises, consumer spending drops, and businesses that depend entirely on local customers lose revenue fast. International customers provide income when the home market cannot.
The story: Ukraine’s GDP dropped more than 30 percent in 2022. Unemployment exceeded 26 percent. Ukrainian businesses that had built international relationships before the invasion were far better positioned than those that had not. When local customers stopped buying, these businesses redirected sales to customers in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere. By 2023, Payoneer found that 44 percent of Ukrainian SMBs were actively planning to grow their business internationally. The ones making those plans from an existing base of foreign clients were in a completely different situation than those trying to build international connections from zero while also managing a crisis at home.
The lesson: International customers are not a luxury for growth. They are a form of insurance.
9. Take Care of Your People, or You Will Have No Business Left
War depletes talent. Employees get mobilized into military service, relocate to safer areas, or burn out from the stress. A business that loses its key people cannot replace them easily, especially when the available talent pool is shrinking everywhere.
The story: McKinsey’s research into Ukrainian businesses found that the companies with the highest staff retention during the war shared a few practices. They continued paying some portion of salary to employees who were mobilized into the military, even though they were legally not required to. They communicated honestly with their teams, even when the news was bad. They gave employees more decision-making authority, so the business could keep functioning even when leadership was unavailable. Companies that did these things kept their teams together through conditions that should have pulled them apart. The ones that did not found themselves operating with skeleton crews, constantly retraining new people, and losing institutional knowledge they could not get back.
The lesson: Your team is harder to replace than your equipment. Treat them accordingly.
10. Cut Your Costs to the Bone and Guard Your Cash
This connects to earlier points about cutting early, but it deserves its own space because of how specifically it applies to cash. In wartime, credit dries up, investors get nervous, and revenue becomes unpredictable. Cash on hand is what keeps you alive long enough to adapt.
The story: During World War I, the United States raised the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money through war bonds, turning ordinary citizens into lenders to the government. The point is not the war bonds themselves, but what they illustrate: in wartime economies, money moves differently and credit tightens. Businesses that understood this and acted quickly to preserve cash had options that others did not. In 2022 and 2023, Ukrainian entrepreneurs who managed to secure funding from multiple sources, including government grants, international funds like those from Google’s Ukraine support program, and private investors, gave themselves cushions that no single source could have provided. One common piece of advice from business owners who survived: never depend on one funding source, and always know exactly how long your cash will last at your current burn rate.
The lesson: Know your runway. Then make it longer.
The Common Thread
Look across all ten of these points and one idea runs through all of them: the businesses that survive wartime are the ones that move. They move products, move locations, move plans, move assumptions. They stop doing things that no longer work and start doing things the new situation actually needs.
The businesses that do not survive are usually waiting. Waiting for things to normalize. Waiting to see if it gets better. Waiting until they have more information. By the time they decide to move, it is often too late.
Understanding how businesses survive during wartime comes down to one word: speed. The cost of waiting is almost always higher than the cost of being wrong.
Selected Sources
Point 1 — Marsala shoes / Maria Masliy (Ukraine)
Point 1 — Ford / Willow Run (WWII)
Point 2 — Soviet factory relocation (WWII)
- Wikipedia — Evacuation in the Soviet Union:
- Left-Horizons — Eighty years ago: evacuation of Soviet war factories:
- Soviet industry in WWII (Wikipedia):
- Michigan State University — Seventeen Moments in Soviet History:
Point 2 — Ukraine business relocation (2022)
Points 3, 5, 9 — McKinsey Ukraine research
Point 7 — Mattatuck Manufacturing (WWII)
Point 8 — Ukraine GDP and unemployment
