If Something Happened and You Could No Longer Run Your Business, Would It Crash and Burn?
What if that something happened tomorrow?
Unless you have discovered a secret serum for immortality (and if you have, we hope you’ll share it!), at some point you will no longer be running your business. Hopefully, that change will happen at a time of your choosing– when you decide to retire or sell the business, for example. But there are no guarantees; you could also die unexpectedly or become disabled.
So what will happen when that time comes?
Would your business be dead on arrival without you? Would your team be able to carry on, or would it take several frustrating months of chaos for them to figure out how to go forward, during which time your business would die by attrition to your competitors?
And what about your family– would they be compensated for your share of the business, or would they sell off valuable equipment for pennies on the dollar to cover your business debts because they were taken advantage of by an unscrupulous business broker? Or worse, would they have to cover your business debts from their personal resources, leaving them without the means to live the way you all do now?
These aren’t random possibilities pulled out of the air for dramatic effect; they actually happened to clients we were called in to assist when it was already too late.
That’s why we are such big proponents of Succession Planning: it’s the only way to make sure worst-case scenarios like those above don’t happen to your family and your business.