A year ago I damaged my knee while running. Months and months of treatment later, I had near 100% recovery and was beginning to forget the tremendous pain I once had. Until two days ago.
Eight minutes into my maiden run, the damage happened again. With swelling and a sleepless night of pain, surgery is near.
It made think of something this morning. I’m lucky the injury doesn’t affect my business. If I had a different career or profession, I might be in a world of trouble. What if I had a job that required physical labor or mobility? What if not me, but a key employee had a work affecting injury?
There are many small businesses whereby an injury to an owner or key employee halters operations. Beyond insurance and health plans to care for the injured person, does your business have a contingency plan to maintain operations while someone heals?
While you wouldn’t want to stop your business to work every contingency, it’s worthy of looking across your business and identifying areas of single-threaded weakness, making changes now to lessen your exposure of loosing an employee unexpectedly.
Do you have the ability to quickly partner, share, or shift workloads to others? Does your backlog have room for an additional week or two of production to absorb a slowing of operations?