It feels like it comes up in the group at least a few times a year (especially for solopreneurs)… The dreaded “hit by a bus” question.
Basically, if you suddenly and unexpectedly couldn’t work, what happens next?
As agencies, we hold the keys to a lot of our clients’ digital assets. Hosting accounts, domains, logins, billing, backups, and all the things that work in the background keeping their businesses running.
Maybe we don’t own it all outright, but if you disappeared tomorrow, I bet you can think of at least a few clients who’d be totally lost.
It’s not a fun thing to think about, which is probably why most of us avoid it.
But this week I got a reminder that doesn’t have to be as dramatic as taking 20-ton bus to the chin to become very real.
A family member needed completely unexpected emergency surgery and has been in the hospital, which suddenly pulled me out of work with zero warning.
Meanwhile, my calendar was full of booked meetings, projects had looming deadlines, and all of my routine tasks still needed to get done.
I quickly realized that I was doing all of this the hard way.
Trying to handle a personal emergency while scrambling to notify clients, reschedule calls, get people to cover for me, and figure out what might fall through the cracks next has been extremely stressful.
And a big wake-up call.
If you’ve got a team, you can pass the baton and most things can get taken care of. But if you’re on your own, it’s not that simple.
Life happens to all of us. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a question of when.
I’ve seen a lot of ideas tossed around to help in these situations — documentation, trusted peers, shared vaults, written contingency plans — but none of them are perfect.
Between the morbid nature of the topic and all the edge cases where we can still see flaws in any plan, it’s easy to avoid setting something up because it’s never going to be perfect.
But this week has convinced me that something is infinitely better than nothing. In the few places where I did have support (shoutout to everyone that stepped up for me in huge ways this week), even if it wasn’t perfect, it was a huge help.
It’s easy to treat contingency planning as important but not urgent… Until it’s suddenly the only thing that matters.
So, if this topic has been floating around in the back of your mind, let this be your nudge to put something in place — even if it’s just an out of office you can copy/paste so you don’t have to think about what to say when your mind is elsewhere.
