Law Firm Management: Do you have an emergency plan?

I don’t usually share too much of my personal life on this blog (mainly because I’m just naturally a private person), but this morning as I sat and drank my coffee and looked out at the early morning dew drying under the rays of the morning sun across the pastures, I realized how important this topic was for me to share.

It’s part of the journey, it’s part of running a successful business, and I need to share it.

This year has been the absolutely hardest year of my life. In January and February my husband had four major surgeries, and then we received the horrifying news from the doctors that his cancer was not only back but it had metastasized and was all throughout his body, stage IV and no treatments were available.

About that same time, I was forced to make some sudden career shifts when it became clear the person I spent the last two years and a half years building revolutionary tools and systems for the legal industry with, no longer had the same vision for the company (or the future) that I did.

Really, could life get any worse? I wanted to crawl up in bed, pull the cover over my head and not wake up. But I have 2 kids and a sick husband so that wasn’t an option.

I’m not brave, I’m not strong, I simply am. And I had to do what I had to do when it became clear my back was up against the wall.

So, I brushed myself off, let go of the anger and ego, and said we need to make the best of this—which meant I re-launched my own business that I had put on hold doing the things I talked about above over the past few years.

However, a strong team grew from the relationships that I had made during that process (being some of the dearest friends I have) and we re-built the business that I had neglected for so long within a matter of months.

So why am sharing this now? Well, it is 6 months later and my husband’s cancer is progressing, hospice visits regularly, (nurses, doctors, CNA’s, social workers, therapists, chaplains…) he is on lots of meds, and requires more and more of my attention.

Yet because I knew this day would someday come, I re-launched my business with clear plans and systems in place so that if I ever needed to take a temporary absence (whether that be a day or 2-3 weeks) I could rest easy knowing everything would carry on smoothly and efficiently until I was able to jump back in and take the reins.

I am lucky (which seems strange because most days I’m not feeling to lucky right now), but I have been given time to plan for my absence and to have systems in place, so that my business will run without me when I need to be gone. Because, I will need to be gone a few days here and there to be with my kids and my husband as we go through this journey together.

So I said all that to say: what is your emergency plan?

Do you have systems and plans in place that would allow your business to run without you should unexpected circumstances arise? Or forget unexpected circumstances! Perhaps you just want to go on vacation. Do you have things set up so you can leave town for a week and not have to worry about whether your clients are being serviced in the same manner that they would be if you were there doing it yourself?

So many of you are my friends, and I care about you, don’t leave things to chance, you have worked hard to build your business, PLEASE make sure you have a documented, systematized plan in place in case of an emergency that would require you to be “gone” because you may not have weeks or months to plan for it….as I was blessed to have.