Looking after yourself and your business during illness

flyingsnail

I am in the later stages of developing my business plan and I was hoping to start my business this summer, unfortunately I became ill in late February and now everything is on the back burner. Now while it looks like I will make a full recovery it has left me wondering how I would keep things going if I did become sick while self employed.

I know on the financial side I can look at income protection insurance and having a financial reserve to fall back on (although that is easier said than done during the start-up phase) but I am also trying to think out the practical side of keeping the business running, maintaining client relationships and limiting an potential damage to the business if I was unable to work.

I will be a one man operation providing a professional service, about 80% business to business with recurring clients and about 20% business to consumer with little recurring business.

I was wondering if it was something you had thought about, or put plans in place to deal with? Larger organisations would have staff to fall back on but as a single person there is no such luxury.

jimmii

Yep its a big problem. You could always sub-contract until you were better buts thats obviously not ideal hard to see what else you could do other than just reject clients if you're physically unable to do the work yourself. Fingers crossed it doesn't happen!

gargargar

You can take out Keyman (person) insurance, however I think it might be more applicable when there is more than one person.

Maybe you could look to get to know another one man band in the same area and agree some cover deal?

pedroeibar1

Sorry guys, but NO on the basis of the info given. OP if your illness was serious it will most likely be regarded as a 'pre existing condition' and any losses arising from that will not will NOT be covered by insurance. You really need to talk to a professional (broker) to check out your situation..

dbran

Hi

One thing you could do (and is mandatory for some professions) is to have a continuity of practice agreement with another or similar firm to run and manage your organisation in the event of you becoming incapacitated for some reason.

Once you are back up and running you take back the business or if this is not possible you can sell it to them.

Aside from that the only other safeguard is to take on a manager or partner who you can trust to run things while you are way.

dbran

flyingsnail

Thank you to everybody for the replies

It does seem that the only option would be to employ / sub contract or engage the services of somebody else.

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Sorry guys, but NO on the basis of the info given. OP if your illness was serious it will most likely be regarded as a 'pre existing condition' and any losses arising from that will not will NOT be covered by insurance. You really need to talk to a professional (broker) to check out your situation..

Absolutely , fortunately treatment has a very high success rate with less than 1% recurrence in 10 years.

In the past I have been heavily evolved in organisations that carried out tabletop exercises and debriefs after events to aid future planning. I found having an action plan, even if it was just in my head, very beneficial where complicated decisions were thought through beforehand. That what I am trying to do here, think through the options, the positives vs negatives of each.