The Grief Plan Your Small Business Doesn't Have

A friend who runs a 22-person landscaping compnay lost her operations lead in April. Not to a competitor. To a heart attack, on a Tuesday. Payroll ran that Friday because someone on her team happened to know the login. That's not a plan. That's luck.

What actually falls apart in week one

When a key person disappears without warning, the failures are boring and specific. Nobody knows the password to the payroll system. The commercial insurance renewal is sitting in an inbox nobody checks. The one client who only ever emailed the missing person goes silent for eleven days and then leaves. The bank needs a signature from someone who isn't there.

I've watched this happen twice in companies I care about. Both times, the business survived. Both times, it cost somewhere between $40,000 and $90,000 in lost clients, emergency contractor fees, and the two weeks the owner spent doing forensic work instead of running the company. That number is avoidable. Not all of it. Most of it.

What a real continuity document looks like

I'm not talking about a 40-page binder. I'm talking about one shared document, updated every quarter, that any of your top three people could open and use. Mine has five sections:

• Every recurring payment, who it goes to, what account it comes from, and when it hits.
• Every login for anything that touches money or clients, stored in a password manager with two people holding recovery access.
• The top ten client relationships, with a named backup owner for each.
• Insurance policies, renewal dates, and the broker's cell phone number.
• A short list of the three attorneys, CPAs, and bankers to call in the first 48 hours, with what each of them handles.

That's it. Two hours to build the first version. Thirty minutes a quarter to keep it current. If you can't spare that, the business is already fragile in ways this document won't fix.

The part owners avoid

The uncomfortable piece is the owner's own absence. If you're the signer on the bank account and the only person who talks to your biggest client, your company has a single point of failure and it's you. I'd rather train a second-in-command who can sign checks and lose a small amount of control than pretend I'm immortal. Every specific instance I've seen where an owner refused to share access, the family paid for that refusal later. Talk to your attorney about a limited power of attorney and a corporate succession clause. It's a two-hour conversation and it might be the most useful two hours you spend this year.

If you've been meaning to write this document for a year and haven't, that's exactly the kind of small operations project we help owners knock out in an afternoon. Send us a note and we'll walk you through what we use.

— Amanda @ SBATC