It doesn’t matter who you are or how many resources you have available, something will happen within the next year, or so that will disrupt your business somehow. It may be a family matter, a purely business issue inside your operation, or it may be an external matter entirely out of your control – but it is going to happen.
Because of the certainty that disruption happens, having a plan in place that makes your business more resilient to these influences is imperative. The thing that causes problems is going to happen, and probably more than once. But no worries, if you have a plan in place, you’ll be able to build resilience into your business as you grow your business.
People Perform Better with a Plan
When disaster strikes, one thing is clear about human nature – if we have a plan that we’ve practiced, such as a fire drill, for example – it saves lives and property. If you have a plan in place for emergencies and other issues such as taking a sick day, you’ll naturally perform better due to having the plan in place.
To Safeguard Assets
As a business owner, you have numerous assets that you may not realize you have. Your email list, your website, the software you use, your products, and services that you provide are all assets in a way, some are more obvious than others, but future planning can mitigate the need to lose the critical parts of your business and life if something goes wrong.
This may come in the form of setting up the right business entity to protect your personal assets should the business fail for some reason, or it may come from another element in your plan, but it will work to safeguard your assets due to thinking about the potential before anything happens.
Increases Workflow Understanding
When you plan for disruptions, it requires that you develop standardized systems and plans for your business that designs workflows for yourself and your employees or contractors to follow. When you have a proper workflow, you will notice in advance the potential for disruptions and thus create a plan to avoid it. For example, what if your email autoresponder service goes out of business? What will you do? Have you identified an alternative that makes it easy for you to move over?
Disruptions Will Happen
Whether you get sick, or someone else does, or you experience a weather emergency, or killer technology destroys your business (after all, no one uses VHS tapes, now, right?), something is going to happen to disrupt your business. If you can accept that and plan for it, you’ll automatically start building a truly resilient business.
If you accept that things will happen to cause setbacks, whether parts of your everyday life, such as chronic illness or something out of a disaster movie (weather, pandemics, political turmoil), you can develop a plan that makes you more resilient personally as well as professionally. You probably can’t plan for every single thing, but the planning process itself will help you learn more about yourself and your business so that you can overcome, one way or another, almost anything.