How To Run Your Business During a Personal Crisis

I had a pretty big family emergency recently actually it wasn't just one it was multiple all at the same time now I'm not gonna bore you to death with all of the details but it's enough to say that life was pretty tough I had zero notice zero warning and I had absolutely no choice but to drop everything that I had and be there for my loved ones now if I didn't have an absolutely awesome team at CEO entrepreneur my current business it probably would have absolutely just crumbled disintegrated imploded in itself clients whilst understanding they're not going to sit there and wait forever whilst you are not providing a service that they've paid for I'm not trying to be super dramatic here but this is what happens when you're always working inside your business you become a dependency you become the bottleneck and you just can't afford to do that not if you want to run your business successfully this business will self-destruct in three two one That's it man game over man this game over if you're interested to know how we kept CEO entrepreneur running then stick around and I'll share with you how we kept it going as smoothly as possible before you go ahead and hit that emergency button here's what I want you to consider right now can your business run without you can your payment still be received can your client still be managed can your production owned fulfillment processes still go ahead if you answered no to any one of these things then you've got a problem because you know what your business needs to run without you scratch that your business needs to be able to run better without you we often talk about working on your business rather than inside your business so that you can take some planned time off whether that's a holiday with yourself with friends family loved ones or even just some time for you to be able to switch off but what happens in the case where you have an unplanned unexpected situation you see your business needs a system but not just any system A system that can protect you in the case of emergency and that is the contingency planning system AKA your backup plan this backup plan will not just simply apply when you you need to step out of your business it should also cover your team going on holiday or if any one of your people inside your team decides to leave all of a sudden this is a system that will make sure that your business can operate when things potentially go wrong in an unexpected scenario the first thing is having the right people in place and it doesn't matter if you are one person or a hundred people or a thousand people inside your business the rules are still the same and this system needs to be planned well in advance if you're a solopreneur you might be saying to me hey Tama what gives I don't have people what are you talking about how can I assign people to do these things when I don't have anyone it doesn't apply to me it applies to you just as much if not even more so because let's face it as a solopreneur as one person if you're not there for your business there is no business there is no business so we need to make sure that your business can keep running even if you have to step away for a while and some of the things that you should be doing is like for example reaching out to a friend family loved one somebody that you know and trust where you can and say here if something goes wrong and I have to step away here are some protocols and here are some things that you can do please for me to keep the business running and then you provide them with a list of your key clients a list of your contacts a list of your suppliers a list of like projects or or at least where they can go and look for the most updated list give them a fire link and walk through it with them beforehand so that they know where to look for these things and give them a set of processes and a set of things that they could do on an emergency basis to keep the business running at a Bare Bones level you don't have to expect them to do absolutely everything but at the very basic level where you say this needs to happen to keep the business going another thing you could do is if you have another business owner who's in a similar industry as you who's a friend try and ask them to have a buddy system where you can support each other's businesses if one person has to step away and you're going to help me with it if you've got a VA it's the perfect opportunity for you to delegate something like this to them instead of looking outside and what you would do is you would walk through with them what would happen in the case of an emergency and this ties a lot into the processes that we're going to just talk about just now in the video so stay tuned but I just wanted to have this key kind of little section in here to say if you're a solopreneur this really does apply to you as much as other people as well let's keep going okay so let's have a look at having the right people in place when you are trying to build a team you need to be able to build an awesome team from the get-go or as quickly as possible as you can afford it and this doesn't matter whether it's in-house employees or outsourced contractors it doesn't matter the process is still the same and what you're looking for is still the same you need to have people that are going to be Dependable reliable extremely skilled and quite frankly have their own initiative because if they don't and you're sitting there trying to chase them to do every single task things are going to just fall apart when you're not there it's falling apart open your eyes so during your hiring process you need to be looking out for these key competencies as well as all of those other elements to make sure that you're bringing in the right people and also so making sure that they buy into your vision so that they will be incredibly motivated your onboarding process your nurturing process remember you're the CEO of the business it's your responsibility to build the right culture in the business and part of building the culture is for this particular instance in case of emergencies that other people can and are willing and able to step in without any confusion and once you've brought in these people then you are having to nominate essentially different people to have backup functions that if you will of the business so that they can start taking over if you do not turn up to work one day or if somebody else has a planned leave or vacation you have backups for these particular functions so you're looking at competency of different people to slightly overlap so that you know that if this person is not available or if you're not available somebody else in the team or a couple of other people can take over this function and share it between them once you've identified that then you start nominating people and you say right in case this person is not there in case I do not turn up to work this person is now responsible for this particular function this time I'm responsible for you or that person is actually now going to take over the day-to-day operations of the business in general and the team will have to look at them as the interim leader or the interim CEO if you will whilst you're not there you also want to make sure that you run through the policies the procedures the processes and make sure that they are aware of all of this stuff have them sign a confidentiality agreement if you haven't done so already because at the end of the day you do trust them but you also want to make sure that if you are sharing extra confidential information with them such as finances and other things they're not going to take your business and steal it and run away anyway real close or they will steer you black so a lot of these things need to be in place from a people perspective now let's have a look at the next one which is having the right sets of processes in place having the right sets of processes in place is going to be equally important when I talk about two sets you need to have two things here I've talked a lot on this channel about having the right systems and processes in place for each of the different functions and each of the different sort of core activities and tasks that you're running inside your business and that is really important and I've got lots and lots of videos about it here where you can click and actually watch an entire playlist on systems and processes that's number one set number one is you need to have the right systems and processes in place so that people can pick them up and actually understand what needs to happen without it all being in your head or somebody else's head so that this process can be replicated again and again by somebody else who can just pick it up and is reasonably competent to do so okay uh what's next the other set of processes that you need to have is your backup plan processes in terms of who does what when in terms of emergency who's going to be responsible for this particular role who's going to have to give approval sign off instead of you for this where does one person's responsibility start and another person's end and these are the kind of things that you need to think about so that people have no confusion whatsoever when you're not there what needs to be done how it needs to be done and in what potential format and who to reach out to in case of approvals so some of the key things that you need to be looking at is like what is their responsibility how much access of resources do they have what kind of decisions can they make you don't want them necessarily to start making huge big strategic three-year decision complete U-turn for your business no no I don't want to you want to be able to give them the right sort of playground if you will in the box and you say this is the playground that you can play in these are the decisions and the approvals and the ownerships and the things that you can actually make decision on and ideally they will be things that you you'll need to run on a day-to-day basis not necessarily big huge strategic decisions the next Point we've touched on a little bit but let's give it its own title because it's a very important part which is the approvals having the right approvals is really crucial what approvals and decision making are you going to allow your team to have without you being there and this is going to be crucial because you don't want them to make necessarily changes that you don't want for your business but at the same time you don't want them to keep trying to ring you and call you and say do we have your approval on this can we make a decision on that do I have your permission to fire so sit there and try and identify the different roles and tasks and and things that need to be done and what each person can make a decision on and how far do they need to be able to go with the decision making and where the approvals are you should not be making approvals on a day-to-day basis these should be things that go through your team so you do not become a bottleneck anyway but if they are still not changed then have someone else assigned to do that when you're not there so essentially what you want to do is to be able to categorize what it is your team can and cannot do during your absence and these can be categorized under two big categories if you will one of them is one-way door decisions and the other one is two-way door decisions the one-way door decisions are really high impact decisions that are usually very hard to reverse like firing someone or being able to build a new office site these are things that are really big decisions and in most cases these are decisions that you will be making or your heads of department or units or pillars or whatever you want to call them that already have that authority to be able to make these really big decisions big decision huh in the case that when you're absent or one of your heads of departments become absent for a certain part of time you want to be able to make sure that you are allocating that to somebody at equal level in terms of another head of department or you yourself if one of your head of heads of Department actually ends up leaving so these are really really high impact decisions and in most cases you don't want to be delegating those as a backup plan unless you've got someone of a similar position of seniority inside your business the second category is your two-way door decisions these are small decisions that should and can and must probably be delegated most of the time if you are still making those decisions you are being a bottleneck to the growth of your business and they need to be delegated anyway however if you still haven't done that this is the time where you start saying okay this is the person that will take over making these decisions if I'm not around Frank I'm nominating you to take my place last but not least is your accountability in terms of who owns what and ideally what you want to be moving towards is delegating ownership and accountability rather than just delegating tasks to people as your business grows this will eliminate you from being the bottleneck inside your business and will allow your business to sort of start breaking through a ceiling because if you're becoming the bottleneck at one point it will only grow so much because everything is coming through to you by delegating ownership and accountability to other people relieves you from being the bottleneck however if you are still holding a lot of the these sort of ownerships of particular tasks or functions or roles then you need to be able to identify people who are going to start taking over that role with the same accountability and ownerships and what they can do which ties into what sort of decisions they can make and what kind of approval processes they have however what you want to be able to do as well is you want to be able to start looking at the whole business as a whole and doing a risk analysis and saying what could possibly go wrong what could go wrong and in the worst case scenario who's going to be able to do what and how am I going to be able to give them accountability and the ownership of that particular thing so that they can make the right decisions so that they can make the right approvals if they need access to some information that they wouldn't have been able to have access to before if they need to start having their own team meetings if they need to have a different structure within their unit these are the kind of things that you need to be thinking about in terms of if something goes wrong what should I do and you want to be able to do that all across the business and throughout each of your roles and functions within the business I've got video up here about the essential functions in every business and these functions need to be accounted for even if it's just you doing them at the moment in terms of who is going to do these particular functions inside your business and who's going to own them and have sort of accept ownership and accountability for if you and when you're not there in addition to trying to identify what could go wrong and what to do about it you want to be able to try and identify in the worst case scenario what are the things that we can actually do inside the business to limit that sort of impact what is Bare Bones minimum operation need look like because if you're not there and you're still the bottleneck for a lot of things chances are that you don't have a lot of people around that can replicate every single thing you do and what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to identify the business can run minimum viable business if you will these elements and these functions and these core functions and they need to be sort of accounted for by having a backup plan for certain other things can stop they don't all need to be replicated and they don't all need to be sort of assigned to people but these are things that don't have necessarily a huge impact to the day-to-day operations of the business or where it will sort of damage your reputation in front of your clients or other people outside the business itself so making sure that you identify this kind of minimum Bare Bones business is going to be really important as part of your risk analysis for your business once you've done all of these things and you've got them in place you want to be able to do a practice run a fire drill if you will because you want to make sure that it can actually happen in the case of an emergency where you really cannot step in whilst you're there and you can step in try and have a practice run first of all try with yourself and maybe a trusted one and then later on make sure that you've got your whole team where you can step away all of a sudden whilst you're observing but making sure that business is still ticking along call it the let's get me out of the business in an emergency protocol or whatever you want to call it but this becomes an integral part of making sure that this process and this system gets implemented in place and like any other system you want to make sure that you are practicing it you are running through it and guess what optimizing it measuring it making sure that you're improving it all along I'll make sure that so if it doesn't work once you go through the practice run try and optimize it try and improve it and try and make sure that it keeps getting better and better so that one day hopefully it doesn't need to happen but if it does happen things are going to be sort of performed at their optimal rate and also your team already understands what they need to do because they've practiced it before and they don't need to sort of panic and say oh my goodness oh oh my goodness where's Tamma which is exactly what happened in our case hopefully in my case it wasn't oh my goodness West Hammer it was okay tama's gone he's no longer a bottleneck we can go and do what we want and make this business even better which is exactly what happened actually the only thing that slowed down is the production of these YouTube videos so if you've noticed on the channel if you're just kind of watching this video as it's first released you'll notice that for the last four months or so there hasn't been a single video I think in the last five months there's been about two videos released on the channel which is unlike the channel because usually we wanted to have have a video a week but in this case this was the only thing inside the operations of the business which needed me to be in front of sort of the camera if you will and even so we're now trying to put in place a process that what kind of videos can we produce without me necessarily being in there so that we can still keep these things going but everything else inside the business was working smoothly our head of operations like our head of business I had a product they all sort of kicked in and they were fantastic the program delivery that we have which is the Firestarter program I don't think most people noticed that I was not there um there were a couple of group coaching calls that I did actually miss out on and that our head of product was able to completely take over that entire group coaching call and in fact I think they were even more productive than me being there don't tell our head of product hey don't tell nobody anyway and our head of business made sure that we've got other things in place in terms of the operations of the business the marketing other things were kicking in things were working as as they would as you can see social media kept going the community tab kept getting posted I wasn't necessarily writing those posts it was other people writing it for me um and the engagement kept going and this channel even though we hadn't actually released a video for the last three months or four months or so the channel has continued to grow which shows you as well it's not always about quantity it's sometimes about quality and making sure that you're giving valuable information to your audience we've also got a new program that we've been developing which is the groundbreaker program and this is for businesses that are under six figures Firestarter is for those that are over six figures wanting to scale their business to seven figures and Beyond and the development of that program has been going through whilst I'm not there everything has been sort of going through smoothly and that's because we have the right processes in place and that's because we have the right accountability and the right ship the right people in place who understand how to take this business to that next level and I was able to go and be with my loved ones and have to just check in potentially sometimes once every two weeks or so just to make sure everything is running I used to get reports from my heads of sort of different units and making sure that the business was running smoothly everything is going smoothly I assure you they were very much telling me you go do your thing we will be fine we will be okay the business is fine and it was and for that I thank them a lot if they are watching this video you've been awesome thank you very much but also I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you the audience who has been ridiculously supportive on the community tabs on our emails on all of these other things thank you thank you very much for your continued support I really appreciate it and I'm gonna keep making sure that we provide the best value for you as possible thank you all very much if you like this video please hit the like button it does make a difference to the channel and I'll see you next time

Channel: CEO Entrepreneur

Views: 8,877

Keywords: tamer shahin, ceo entrep, scaling my business, online business, systems, business systems, systemsandprocesses, processes, riskanalysis, business structure and management, how to scale your business, scale your business, teams, planning, businessplanning, smallbusiness, businessowner, small business, contingency plan, risk analysis, risk analysis process, business emergency, system

Id: AbAhTd6UwPM

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023