If you were a business owner who was considering putting your company on the market but decided not to sell (or at least not anytime soon), what steps should be you taking now? The goals are to ensure preservation of the current business, as well as provide for an orderly and stable future transition when the proper time to sell arrives. Accordingly, the first and most critical step is setting a goal to implement both a business continuity plan and a business succession plan. The sooner, the better.
Developing a Business Continuity Plan
Armed now with the knowledge of how the pandemic impacted your own business operations, you can now plan. Did the travel restrictions impair your sales efforts? Did the substantial increase in employees working remotely overburden your IT infrastructure? Did your vendors and suppliers make requests that you couldn’t respond to effectively?
The goal of a business continuity plan is to identify that which is essential and that which is not and to place the business in a position where it can continue to operate during a disruption. Ideally, the business continuity plan would include:
A comprehensive strategy for keeping the business operating day-to-day.
An assessment of essential and non-essential operations and processes.
An analysis of key employees/positions and how each would be impacted by a disruption and, specifically, the potential loss or unavailability of key employees.
A review of facilities and analysis of how the business operates if one or more location becomes unavailable.
A plan to protect, secure, back up and replicate, if necessary, critical data systems, infrastructure and applications.
These are only a few of the many issues for consideration when developing a business continuity plan. Many of the details are industry-specific, and you need to work with your key employees and advisers to address the challenges likely to face your particular industry. Consider meeting and discussing with your vendors, customers and suppliers the challenges that were presented by the COVID-19 restrictions. Get their views on how things could have been handled more effectively. Information is key to developing a plan that will actually work.
Every organization seems to have those “go-to” people who have been there forever and without whom things run much less smoothly. Consider how the plan is impacted if those individuals are unavailable. The key takeaway is that the plan needs to grow and change with the business in order to work effectively when the disruption happens.
Developing a Business Succession Plan
No matter what your plans are for the future of the business, eventually, you will transition it to someone. Perhaps that someone is a purchaser, or perhaps you will transition to your family, key employees or some combination of the two groups. The point is that transition will eventually be unavoidable. Ideally, you get to control and be part of the process. That, however, is not always the case. Unexpected death of an owner, key executive or employee can cripple a business if no successor has been identified and there is no plan for transitioning management.
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