If Your Business Disappeared Tomorrow, What’s the Plan?

Built to survive you - or built on you?

I’ve been thinking about something recently.

What actually happens to your business if, for whatever reason, you’re suddenly not there?

I’m not talking about selling it. Or succession planning. Or some carefully organised exit strategy.

I mean you’re just… not there.

I suspect a lot of founders, me included, would rather not think about it.

When things are going well, you convince yourself that you’d be fine anyway. You built it once, so you could build it again. The relationships are yours. The knowledge is yours. You know how everything works.

And maybe that’s the problem.

Because if every important relationship comes through you, every big decision needs you and half the things that make the business work exist only in your head, have you actually built an asset?

Or have you built yourself a very demanding job with better branding?

That question makes me slightly uncomfortable because I’ve spent years knowing there are things I should probably get out of my head and into the business.

And I’m guessing I’m not alone.

You don’t need a 40-page disaster recovery plan. I think you just need to ask yourself a few uncomfortable questions.

If I disappeared for a month, what would actually stop?

Who could make the decisions I normally make?

And what do I know that nobody else does?

If you’re running a team, the answers tell you where you’re still too involved.

If you’re on your own, it’s obviously different. You can’t delegate yourself out of the business. But there are still things you can document, simplify or put some kind of backup around.

This isn’t really about preparing for disaster.

It’s about building something that doesn’t require you to be available, brilliant and on it every single day.

Because surely that was part of the point of building a business in the first place?

Not to make yourself indispensable.

But, eventually, to make yourself a little less necessary.