This week, we’re talking about planning for events that affect your ability to work in your side hustle — illness, family emergencies, technology troubles, and more. It’s business continuity planning for your side hustle.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to season three, episode five of the Grow your side hustle Podcast, the podcast to help women grow the business of their dreams, whether they want to run it as a long term side hustle or build it into their main business so they can control their time with their families, and control their money.

I’m your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, here to provide short actionable episodes that will help you build your business.

This week, I want to talk about what you have planned for if you get sick.

So I got sick. And just as I was starting to get well, my computer got very sick. So I couldn’t really record and post my episodes as I like to do. For a while there, I was coughing, and it was ridiculous. So you wouldn’t have wanted to hear my voice anyway. But then when I was feeling better, my technology was not really working out for me.

So that made me learn a few lessons. One is that I needed to record more episodes out, I was, you know, I had three in the can. But that obviously was not enough. And I need to have a backup technology plan. Right now it is an iPad, but I was spending so much of my time trying to get this computer back up and running, that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to get on my iPad and do the work. Then once my computer and my body were back up and running, then I was busting my hump to get all my client work done so that I could fulfill the obligations to the people that were paying me to, to do the things. So that really put me far behind.

What I’m hoping that you can do this, you know, as you think about planning ahead for if you get sick or your technology goes out, hopefully not at the same time like it did for me. Or there’s some sort of family emergency that takes you away from your ability to work. What is your contingency plan. So if you have a team working with you, you could ask them to pick up the slack. And that would help a lot. You know, especially with some of the things like the emails, and the posting of episodes, if you’re doing something like this, fulfilling orders, if you’re selling a product, and just being in touch with people letting them know, if you know, if you’re selling services, what they can expect to get from you when then they can expect to hear from you. Things like that are really important. Another thing that you could think about is, you know, working ahead on things that you can, so that you have the you know, like a slush day, or a slush week, where if you can’t do your work, it’s not the end of the world.

So what I’d like you to do is either open a Word document, or a Google document, or you know, get a notebook, and brainstorm some of the things that can go wrong. And you know, if you’ve worked for a company where you’ve had to do business continuity planning, that’s what we’re doing here. So you just think about the things you know, you get sick, your kids get sick, your dog gets sick, family member has an emergency that you have to travel to your computer dies, all of the things that you can think of that can go wrong in your life that will affect your business. And then once you have all of those, look at what’s most likely, and start brainstorming the solutions, you know, say you think it’s likely that your computer might die. So your solution could be to get a backup computer. Your solution could be to start saving for a new computer so that went if it goes you’re ready to go. You could make a plan to be without your computer for say a week or whatever if you’re planning to send it out to the shop. So just all of the different things. Think about what you’ll need to tell people if say, you know you’re without your computer for a week and who you’ll need to tell it to. So that way, when something happens, you’re not, you know, running around like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what to do.” You have a plan, you know that you’re going to be taken care of your clients, your customers, they’re going to be taken care of your team, if you have one is going to be taken care of. So that you don’t have to worry so much. Now, I will say this is not the most fun task, because sitting around thinking about things that can go wrong, is never the most fun thing to do. But it is critical.

And once you’ve gone through all of your potential scenarios, look at the tools that you need to put in place like if you know, you know that you need an email template, say to let people know, you won’t be back until X date, go ahead and get that set up, then all you or your team will have to do is just plug in the dates, and whatever specific information about the issue that you want to share with people. And that’ll be ready to send. If you have a physical business, you know, you can print, you can get signs ready to go. You know, this is something that we did at the credit union that I used to work at, we had a set of signs that branches could print, if, you know, say there was an ice storm, and they knew that they’d be closing early, or if there was the power was out. And there was nothing that we could do, you know, with our computers and whatnot, so that they could print something and have it ready to go without having to ask anyone, they just knew they had this repository of science to print for various issues that might happen, then if there was an issue that we hadn’t thought of, of course, you know, they could contact us and we would, we would help them out. We had social media posts, you know, drafted so that people could just copy and paste from the Word document into our social media feeds. And that way, you know, we knew that we covered a lot of the ground that we needed to and our staff was prepared. So you know, think about the things that you’ll need to be preparing for, you know, for the public for your team, if something you know if one of your scenarios happens. And it may feel like something you don’t really have the time for. But if you find that you are, you know down for three weeks, you are going to be very happy that you have the tools that you need to make sure that that doesn’t tank your business.

So if you have gone through a business continuity planning either at your day job or for your own business, I would love to hear more about that you can shoot me an email, or you can post on any of my socials.

I hope that this has been an interesting discussion, it’s helping you prepare yourself to be you ready for anything in your business. I’d love to discuss more with you in the Grow your side hustle community on Facebook, you can join that using the link in the show notes. Or just go to Facebook and search for grow your side hustle community, and it should come right up for you. It’s a free group, you just need to answer a few questions and agree to a few things to be part of it.

You can also sign up for the email list and that link is in the show notes also. That way you can get notifications of new things you can access and get immediate access to the Grow your side hustle Resource Library, which has some of the tools that I’ve created to help you achieve what you want with your side hustle. And finally, if you liked today’s episode, please share it with someone that you think might enjoy it. Click the button to subscribe in your podcast app and leave a review because that is key to helping more people find us.

Alright, talk to you next time. Hope to see you in that Facebook group.