What would you do if a key person of your team was suddenly incapacitated? What happens in your business if you are suddenly incapacitated?
These are not fun questions to think about. But they are necessary. Awhile back, one of my bookkeeping firm owner friends had an employee unexpectedly pass away. Last year, a local colleague who did payroll and taxes suddenly died. These things happen. In the latter case, it affected a lot of people: his clients were scrambling to figure out what to do for their payroll, and his loved ones were left figuring out what to do with the business while dealing with the loss.
Some call it a contingency plan. I like calling it the Bus Plan. If someone gets hit by a bus, what happens next?
Your team: employees and vendors
How will you cover if someone can’t work anymore? If it’s a member of your internal team, especially relating to production, you’ll probably cover it with your current staff. You may be quite busy for awhile until you can hire again, but you can probably move some resources and duties around to make it work. What you should absolutely avoid is having someone on your team hold key elements of your business without your knowledge. Passwords, processes, all of these things should be documented so that you can step in if you are in the unfortunate position of needing to take over.
What about your vendors? This may not be an issue with many of your vendors if you work with a company that has a team. For example, if anyone on my team (including me) is taken offline for a period of time, the rest of the team can keep things going. Make sure you know more than one person at the company so you can reach out to a secondary contact. Those are the easy ones - not much planning required. Next, make a list of your vendors and contractors that consist of a key person with no backup. If any of them serve critical functions that you don’t know how to do (like running payroll), how would you handle that? Create a mental list of who could be “on deck” in the future. You don’t need to make any formal arrangements or even have a conversation with them; that might be a little weird. However, considering who you might call is a great exercise to do.
You
This one is much trickier as a small business owner. You built it all. You run it all. You hold all the keys. What on earth happens if you’re not in that position anymore?
First, a goal: build your business to be able to run without you. Client service is the biggest piece of this. If you took off for four weeks, would all of your customers/clients get taken care of like normal? The key to this is having a great team and great documented processes. This will take time, but is totally worth it.
Even when you have an amazing team, there will still be things that are up to you as the owner. Any guesses for what I’m going to say? Yep, document! Make sure everything is documented in one place. What you do, how you do it, where all of the resources are. Which items are critical and which are not?
Then you can build your Bus Plan. You can make this whatever you want. I envision it being as simple as possible and containing important pieces of information.
How to get in touch with your team so they are in the loop and will continue serving clients.
Access to all the things. Password manager, documentation, etc.
A list of critical functions that MUST get done, along with instructions. For example, submitting payroll, paying bills, etc.
A list of key people, like your vendors and what they do.
A list of key information, like your bank accounts.
A transition plan. If your business or client list is sellable, who can help with that? If you wouldn’t sell, how can you make sure your clients are taken care of? Will you have a referral list?
This plan should then be given to or accessible by the person who would need it. A bonus idea is to have a Bus Buddy. This could be another business owner, possibly in your industry, who you’ve agreed to be each other’s person in case of tragedy. They could run your business temporarily, and you could run theirs. They’d also work with your loved ones on winding down or selling.
By the way, this whole topic is a fantastic reason to build your business to be sellable and have your business finances in order.
This post was partially inspired by my husband. A few months ago he asked me what would happen to my business if something happened to me. He knows that I wouldn’t want to let my clients or my employees down. There are a lot of people that are impacted by my business. And he had no idea where to even start. My Bus Plan is a work in progress. And it is better than nothing.