Being Prepared for Being Gone

Sooner or later, everyone misses time at work. Everyone gets sick, has a flat tire, gets pulled over for doing four miles per hour over the limit too close to a school. Whatever your excuse is, the problem is not that you’re not at work. Being absent is just an excuse to create the problem. The real problem is that your work is not happening without you there.
That is the essence of preparedness. If you know (and you do) that sooner or later you’re going to miss time at work, why not set up a system for just such a contingency? If you’ve been in business for more than three days, you’ve already figured out that you need to have systems set up for your employees to be late or absent. Why not have a system in place for yourself?
The key here is the same in any problematic scenario: forward thinking. You know your business better than anyone else, so make sure you know what it would take to recover from your unexpected absence. This applies whether you’re late 10 minutes or 10 days. There’s no single magical formula for making it work, but there are a few good broad strokes.

• Have someone who can manage in your absence, or at least fake it well enough to keep the ship afloat until you return.
• Keep extra non-perishable resources handy, such as an extra ream of printer paper or a few boxes spare pens, in case the office supply person fails to show up.
• If you’re working on extended projects, make sure to keep a list of tasks on your secretary’s desk, so that he or she can delegate for you as small-scale tasks are completed in your absence.
• Assign an ‘Accountability Director’ amongst your staff to keep things running smoothly when your assistant manager is gone.

For more ideas, try reading disaster preparedness handbooks. The same basic principles apply to any unexpected turn of events: plan, delegate, stockpile. The core concept of it is simply to identify what will break down without you there, and set up some sort of contingency plan to keep it running–and a plan to fix it if it stops.
The Importance of Now
We see it on television all the time: people who are so wrapped up in themselves that they feel they can do whatever they want. Unfortunately, this is truth in television: what happens to most people when they enjoy a modicum of success, they begin lose their sense of the importance of punctuality. The more a project or business revolves around a single individual, the more that individual can force other team members to match their schedule. As we all know, however, it is this attitude that destroys business success.
Punctuality is not about you or your team, it’s about the client. No matter how far removed your client is from your current project, you are making money if and only if your client is getting a return on their investment on the client’s terms. Let’s face it, clients don’t want to wait until 9:30 for you to return their morning call regarding progress, and the client shouldn’t have to. If you promised them a professional service, deliver it.
This applies to all clients anywhere, in any business, under any model. Whether it be the infamously late trains in the former USSR or the guy waiting for his burger at the local drive-through, people are paying money for a service. If that service is not provided when they expect it, then you lose custom.
Stress this to your employees: they do not have a job if they are willing to make the customer wait.
Now stress it to yourself”.