When One Person or One Location Is Your Weak Spot: A 10-Minute Reality Check

Over the past two briefs, we’ve looked at outages, missed deliveries, and payment-related disruptions. There is one more pattern I see over and over again when I talk with owners: how much of the business rests on one person, one process, or one fragile routine. Nothing is “wrong” until that person is out or that routine breaks, and then everything stops.

In Greater East Montgomery County, many businesses run lean. That’s part of what makes them agile, but it also creates hidden weak spots. This edition of the Greater East Montgomery Resilience Brief again shares two local risks to watch and one ten-minute action you can take to see your business more clearly.
 

The clearest statistic supporting reliance on a single person for crucial internal functions is that 40% of small firms depend on a single person for core knowledge. Additionally, 60% of small firms close within six months if the owner is incapacitated

This brief looks at:

• Key-person dependence: when too much lives in one person’s head.
  In a lot of small and mid-sized businesses, there is one person who “just knows” how certain things get done: how to run the payroll, how to reset the point-of-sale, who to call when the cooler fails, or how to deal with that one tricky vendor. When that person is on vacation, out sick, or dealing with a family emergency, tasks stack up or stop entirely. Revenue doesn’t always fall off a cliff, but stress climbs, errors creep in, and everyone else spends their day trying to reinvent a process that already exists—just not on paper.

• No simple plan if your space is unusable for a few days.
  We also see more stories than we’d like about burst pipes, small fires, smoke damage, or nearby incidents that temporarily close a building. The business is still “there,” but the normal space is not safe or usable for several days. In our area, that could mean a retail shop that cannot open its doors, a clinic that has to cancel appointments, or a service business that suddenly has nowhere to meet clients. Without a simple “what we do for three to five days” plan, a short disruption in your space can quickly ripple into lost revenue, cancelled appointments, and unhappy customers who quietly move on.

One 10-minute step: Take a first SBRS-style look at your biggest “what ifs.”

You don’t need a thick binder to start seeing your business the way I do when I use the Small Business Resilience Score^TM (SBRS). Take ten minutes this week and do this simple exercise:

1. On a blank sheet of paper, write down the top three “if this happened, we would really struggle” events for your business.

2. Next to each one, quickly rate how ready you feel today on a scale from 0 to 5, where:

   • 0 = “We have nothing in place,”

   • 3 = “We have something, but it’s incomplete or mostly in someone’s head,”

   • 5 = “We have a simple, clear way to handle this that more than one person understands.”

Don’t overthink it; this isn’t a test; it’s a first snapshot. When you look at those three events and those numbers, you’ll usually see one area that clearly feels weakest. That’s your starting point. The full SBRS framework goes much deeper across multiple domains, but this ten-minute step gives you the same kind of honest, high-level view I use when I sit down with an owner for the first time.

I’ve kept this brief in plain English and focused on what you can actually do, not on jargon or worst-case scenarios. The goal is to help you see where a normal week could quietly turn into a crisis—and to give you a simple way to start tightening those weak spots before that happens.

If you’d like a clearer picture than a quick 0–5 rating, you can use my 2-minute mini-assessment (below) to get a fast snapshot of your resilience today. From there, I can help you turn that into a simple priority list, a 30-Day Outage-Ready^TM plan, or a deeper SBRS review, depending on how far you want to go.

• Resilience Intelligence page 

• Take the 2-minute mini-assessment 

• Contact us  

If the idea of a key person being out or your space being unusable for a few days leaves you unsure how you’d manage, that’s exactly the kind of situation I help owners plan for.

Thank you,
Warren