Family before business. Always.

In March, right at the start of lockdown, my lovely, otherwise fit, healthy and relatively young mum had a brain haemmorhage out of the blue. Then in June she had another and a week later passed away. And in between the two she was Incapacitated with a capital I.

Needless to say family comes first and foremost before everything. So through all this I have needed to drop everything and whiz around the M25 to be with my parents more times than I can count. I’ve needed to stay away from home, deal with some awful situations, sit by a hospital bedside for hours and days, pray for her to make it, pray for her to die to end her suffering and be an emotional wreck.

What happens if it’s not just temporary?

Luckily I had a smartphone to email on and the most wonderful clients who were incredibly kind and willing to wait while all that was going on (thank you), and from a business perspective the interruption was only temporary.

But it got me thinking about what on earth would happen to my business if I had a serious illness or accident, or died, or our home (where I work from) burnt down tomorrow. And it scared me.

Consider this your nudge

We really do not know what is around the corner for any of us.

Like the vast majority of people, I just assume I am going to be here and in full health next week, next month, next year. So did my mum.

Unless I’ve missed something, I’m almost certainly in a similar boat to the majority of other small business owners who are equally unprepared, so I thought you might need a nudge too. Consider this it.

Dealing with your personal affairs if something happens

If you’re fortunate to have been married for a long time, your OH will probably know everything in terms of your personal matters, finances, friends and their contact details. If you have wills, if the worst happened that side of it is hopefully relatively clear-cut.

But what about dealing with your business affairs if something happens?

But what about your business? I don’t know about yours, but my hubby wouldn’t know where to start because he has no idea about:

• Who my clients are, how to contact them, what projects I have on, what they’ve already paid for and what is outstanding

• Who my websites are hosted with and how to access the back end to update or cancel them

• Who my accountant is and how to contact her

• Who my business bank accounts are with and how to access them

• My insurance policies, CRM systems, social media pages and the groups I run, Mailchimp, paid for plugins, where my laptop back-ups are, etc etc etc.

If something happened to me he wouldn’t know where to start in communicating with people, let alone cancelling things, accessing money and tying up loose ends, or selling my businesses.

My businesses are relatively straightforward, but add partners, employees, premises, stock, loans etc into the mix and there’s a whole lot more to deal with.

And that’s pretty worrying.

Here are 6 things to do right NOW

So at the risk of sounding depressing, because none of know what’s around the corner, go off and do this straight away:

1. Make a detailed list of what you have from those bullet points above and tell your nearest and dearest where to find that list (and review it from time to time). You can download my business emergency template (Word document) to help you here.

2. Set up a password bank and tell those one or two trusted people how to access it

3. Investigate cloud back-ups so that you have everything stored securely outside of the house too

4. GDPR complicates things in this regard because you may well have access to client data, so that’s something I need to look into. I’ll let you know once I know more.

5. Look into a Lasting Power of Attorney and Business Lasting Power of Attorney so that there’s someone in place to deal with matters if you can’t. After a quick google, the FT and Law Society both have articles which seem to be a good place to start. When everything is fine and dandy that feels like overkill, but if everything wasn’t then it might be vital.

6. Modify your will to include your business (and obviously get a will if you haven’t already!)

And finally…

On that cheery note I’m going to finish up. I hope it gave you some food for thought. If you’re more organised than me and already have this sorted, please do comment below to share how you’ve done it.

Claire