If you’re going to start your own business as an independent consultant, with no business partners at all, one thing you need to think carefully about is business continuity, in case you fall victim to circumstances leaving you unable to work for an extended time.
This isn’t the most exciting topic in consulting. Nobody starts a business thinking about what happens when things go wrong. But I’ve seen enough solo consultants get blindsided by illness, injury, or family emergencies that I think it deserves more attention than it typically gets.
Interestingly, business continuity consultants—people who help organizations prepare for operational disruptions—are among the worst at applying their own advice to their personal practices. There’s some irony there. They’ll spend months helping a client develop disaster recovery plans and then have absolutely nothing in place for their own one-person firm.
An Unwelcome Scenario
Take an extended illness for example (although I hope you never have to deal with the experience). If you are unable to carry on working, you, your business and your customers will have to contend with the following issues:
- Stalled customer projects
- Customers that have to find another consultant
- No guarantee that customers will return when you are back in business
- Lost marketing and sales opportunities
- Stress from the above issues, which can be detrimental to a fast recovery from illness
The thing is, these problems compound. A guy I knew had a mild heart attack—he was fine, but needed about six weeks off. By week two, his two biggest clients had found other consultants to finish their projects. By week four, those relationships had solidified. When he came back, he essentially had to rebuild from scratch. Not because anyone was being malicious. Just because business moves on.
What Business Continuity Consultants Know (That You Should Apply to Yourself)
If you’ve ever worked in or alongside the business continuity consulting space, you know the standard framework: identify risks, assess impact, develop response plans, test those plans, and review regularly.
Most solo consultants skip all of this for their own practices. They’re too busy, or they figure the odds are low, or honestly they just don’t want to think about it. I get it.
But you don’t need a formal business impact analysis document sitting in a drawer somewhere. What you need is honest answers to a few questions:
What would happen to current projects if I couldn’t work for two weeks? Six weeks? Three months? The answers are different, and the plans should be different too.
Who would even know to contact my clients? If you’re in the hospital, does anyone have access to your client list? Your email? Your project files?
How long can I actually survive with zero income? Not how long you think you could make it work if you really had to. How long before you’d be in genuine financial trouble.
Prepare a Contingency Plan
We all live in hope that life won’t deal any blows of such a nature. Really though, however slim the likelihood, it’s best to prepare a plan for business continuity and protection in the event that illness or some other event puts you out of action.
The following ideas might be useful as part of a business continuity strategy, or at least to offer some protection if the worst should happen:
Customer communication: You should think about how you will get word out to your customers if something should happen suddenly. If the need arises, you will need to give realistic estimates of how long you will be out of action and support customers in preparing a plan to manage without you—preferably one that doesn’t involve them taking business elsewhere.
Get health and disability insurance cover: While none of us likes paying for insurance, medical cover is a must. If you are ill, you won’t be generating any revenue to cover healthcare expenses. Disability cover is also advisable, as it will at least provide you with some income if you are seriously injured and unable to work with clients.
Start saving funds as a cushion: Even if it means going without some things you think you need for a while, you should try to save and put some funds aside to keep you going through a period with no work.
Consider a reciprocal agreement with a consulting colleague: Over time, you will probably come to know some fellow independent consultants (if not, you should get busy networking in your field). Try to come to a reciprocal business continuity agreement with one of these colleagues, in which she would cover for you in the event of a problem and vice versa.
The Reciprocal Agreement Deserves More Attention
I want to expand on that last point because I think it’s the most underutilized protection available to solo consultants.
The idea is simple: find another consultant—ideally someone with complementary skills who serves a similar market but isn’t a direct competitor—and agree to back each other up. If something happens to you, they step in to keep your critical client relationships warm. You do the same for them.
This doesn’t mean they take over your projects entirely. Usually it means they serve as a point of contact, keep clients informed, maybe handle urgent small tasks, and basically prevent relationships from going cold while you recover.
The hard part is finding the right person and actually having the conversation. It feels awkward to approach someone and say “hey, want to plan for my potential incapacitation?” But business continuity consultants have these conversations with clients all the time. They know that planning for disruption isn’t pessimistic—it’s professional.
A few things to sort out if you go this route: How will they access what they need? What are they authorized to do and not do? How will compensation work if they actually have to step in? Get it in writing. Doesn’t need to be fancy, but it should be clear.
Without partners in your business, there is no guarantee that you won’t lose customers and revenue if you are out of action for a few months or even weeks. However, by putting some business continuity plans in place now, (perhaps including some of the measures suggested in this post), at least you won’t be completely wrong-footed if disaster should strike.