Abstract
During their life cycles, many companies are confronted with crisis. The aim of this paper is to empirically test theoretical approaches in the case of 30 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from Germany. The presented explorative study contributes gaining a deeper insight how these companies deal with crisis. The interviews were analysed by the qualitative method GABEK that transforms abstract individual unstructured and unorganised texts onto a collective level. Among others, the results show that the personal contact to stakeholders is an added value of SMEs because of their size in order to manage and overcome crisis. Finally, it is shown that crisis can be best overcome by focusing on the core business and growth, in addition to job cuts and reduction of working time.