Small Business Leadership: How One Winter Shutdown Taught Me to Prepare for the Predictable Unpredictable
I learned a hard lesson one January when a two-day ice storm closed our storefront and left our team stranded. The phones stopped ringing. A week later we discovered a missed shipment and a payroll error. Those were avoidable failures. The episode rewired how I approach small business leadership and daily operations.
This piece lays out the practical changes I made. You will get concrete steps you can use tomorrow to reduce one-off disasters, shore up cash and keep your operation running when something goes wrong.
Recognize the single biggest vulnerability: people, not systems
Owners assume software will save them. It will not. The moment that mattered, the people who knew how to run the process were not available. We had processes documented poorly and no backup for critical roles.
Start by naming three functions that cannot stop for two days. For many small firms that list is payroll, supply ordering and customer communication. Once you name them, map who does each step and what happens if they are unavailable.
Create a two-person coverage plan for every critical task. One person executes. One person reviews. That second person does not need to be a manager. They need to know where the checklists are and how to find help. The redundancy costs little and prevents long delays.
Make cash resilience tactical and measurable
After the storm we realized cash flow assumptions had implicit optimism. A missed shipment turned into a supplier fee and then an overdraft charge. We counted on revenue that had not arrived.
Put three short metrics on a single dashboard. Current cash on hand. Scheduled obligations over the next 30 days. Your single worst-case scenario spend. Update the dashboard weekly and use it in every staff meeting.
If you cannot hold 14 days of operating cash, build a committed plan to reach that target within six months. That plan can include trimming discretionary spend, tightening payment terms or creating a small-line-of-credit option. The important part is a written, dated plan with an owner and a checkpoint.
Document decisions the way you document contracts
Before the winter shutdown we treated informal agreements as sacred. A voicemail was treated the same as a signed order. That led to confusion when staff tried to resolve a dispute.
Write down decisions that affect delivery, pricing or staffing. Use short decision memos. A decision memo has three parts: the decision, the reason and the next review date. Store memos in one shared folder labeled for quick retrieval.
That habit stops the “who said what” problem. After the storm we used memos to reconcile a missed shipment. The memo gave context and sped the recovery.
Use small drills to avoid big failures
We did a tabletop drill within two weeks of the event. It lasted 45 minutes. Two managers role-played being unreachable while others followed the two-person coverage plan. The drill revealed gaps. We adjusted checklists and the emergency contact list.
Drills do not have to be elaborate. Run a 15-minute drill once a quarter that focuses on one area. Close the front door for an hour and see how phone and order handling performs. The friction you find in a drill is the same friction that will hurt you on a real day.
Build a culture where contingency is ordinary
Practical leadership in a small business means making contingency a routine expectation. When contingency feels exceptional people delay it. When it feels ordinary people plan for it.
Model the behavior. Start meetings with a short update on what would stop us this week and who could step in. Reward the person who volunteers to fill knowledge gaps. That attention shifts thinking from blame to capability.
If you want a quick primer on building those habits, study examples of effective leadership in small organizations. The focus should be on simple, repeatable habits rather than on dramatic responses.
Close the loop: review, learn, and harden
After every disruption, run a short after-action review. Ask three questions. What happened? What did we miss? What do we change immediately? Keep the review to 30 minutes and assign owners for each change.
We tracked our fixes on a single sheet. Within 90 days our staff knew backup steps for payroll, suppliers accepted alternate ordering contacts and we had a one-week cash buffer. The fixes did not require big technology purchases. They required attention, discipline and follow-through.
Running a small business means balancing today’s work with tomorrow’s risks. The winter that upended us forced sensible changes that improved service, reduced stress and protected cash. Those changes came from naming vulnerabilities, making simple redundancy, documenting decisions, running short drills and insisting contingency be an ordinary part of the week.
Apply one of these ideas this week. Name your three critical functions. Put them on a single sheet. Decide who can cover each function at a moment’s notice. If you do that, you reduce the chance that the next predictable unpredictable event becomes a crisis.
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