Entrepreneurs can be notorious for their unique ways of thinking and working. The fact that they are often different from most people in the business world is what makes them branch out on their own and start up their own companies.
If you are the owner and progenitor of a small business, then it is your vision that drives the company and most likely you that is the heart of the business. Although your personality and unique vision as an entrepreneur is crucial to the success of your venture, it is also incredibly important that everything can run without you.
Business continuity and preparation is not just for big business
I was told by a former editor that all the work I was doing should be annotated and filed in such a way in a shared hard drive that someone else could carry on with my work in the event that I was hit and killed by a bus.
Aside from being slightly concerned that this was a thinly veiled threat and instilling an unhealthy dose of paranoia in me whenever I crossed the road outside the office, this struck me as good advice. If something does happen to you, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be as final as my editor had intimated/threatened, then the work that you were doing does have to carry on and you should be making it as easy as possible for someone else to pick up where you left off.
Whilst this is true for simple worker bees like I was at the time, it is just as important for those higher up the food chain. Imagine the impact that you as an entrepreneur and small business owner can have by going AWOL without instructions left for what to do in your absence?
Business continuity is indeed a whole industry in itself and preparing for the unexpected is something that you can cover to a certain extent with business insurance in general, but here are three other things you can do as a small business owner to make recovering from an unforeseen incident easier.
1. Self documenting
When it comes to computer work, there are some simple steps to make your system decipherable, and I will admit right now that I break every single one of these rules.
a) Don’t hide important mission critical things away on a private computer that no one else has access to.
b) Name things in a sensible and consistent manner.
c) Place files in logical folders and sub-folders.
d) Do not recreate the Labyrinth with your sub-folders – anyone trying to decode your system will expect to encounter a minotaur at the end.
e) Do not append any version of a file with the word “final” because you will inevitably end up iterating that with “final final” or “final final final” or “actually final” or “REALLY FINAL”, which can make finding the actual final version rather complicated for yourself, let alone a third party tying to establish the hierarchy of “actually” and “really”.
Keeping stuff logical is important, but make sure that it’s logical by the standards of everyone else and not just you. As mentioned above, it is likely that your entrepreneurial brain operates vastly different to how most people think. In the nicest possible way, the way that you organise and manage things naturally will probably be a bit special when considered by other people.
2. Clear appointment of responsibility
Make it clear from the outset whose responsibility it is to take over abandoned business critical tasks if you are taken out of action and make sure it is clear who should perform your roles. This can make it easier for other people to prepare for the unexpected and any unforeseen events become much less of a burden on your staff or partners.
It’s also a good idea to make sure that you have some kind of deputy or second in command that you trust to run things in your absence. Without adequate delegation, your operation will most likely fall apart if you’re not there to see it through. You might be able to give it a nudge in the right direction depending upon how incapacitated you become, but being prepared sooner rather than later is the most sensible option by far. You don’t want to leave people bickering over who does what when there’s no one left running business critical operations.
3. Share your work
Unless you’re working on something that is absolutely top secret, sharing what you’re doing and updating someone on your progress from time to time is useful. This doesn’t have to be a time consuming/time wasting daily briefing, but a quasi-regular update can go a long way to keeping others in the loop.
This might be something you don’t feel you need to do if you’re running a small company and you might feel that your communication is already as good as it needs to be. It might also be that you feel this is something that only your staff need to do and that being at the top you shouldn’t really answer to anyone, but not only will you find it useful in the case that someone has to take over, but you’ll probably also find that it can also keep you to task a little more. Knowing that there is some kind of deadline on your work, even if it’s largely self imposed, can have the added bonus of increasing your productivity.
Your business shouldn’t end with you
The work you’re doing is important and if it’s not important, there’s not a lot of point in you doing it, much less investing your entrepreneurial efforts into it. With this in mind, it is important that anything you do can be finished by others. If you are truly irreplaceable, then you need to take measures to amend that.
About The Author
Written by David Hing for YOUR Insurance, a broker specialising in public liability insurance for small businesses.