Features - December/January 2005

Pinch Hitters

by Melany Klinck

You may be the highest-paid player on the team, but if you're taken out of the game, who could take your place? The small-business owners in this story lived through extended--and unexpected--absences. They learned why backups are not optional.

Delegation doesn't come easily to small-business owners. "No one cares about my company like I do," you think. How could I trust someone else with such a huge piece of my life--not to mention, my livelihood?

But sometimes delegation isn't optional, it's necessary. None of the small-business owners in this story planned to be away from the office for so long. Who would fill your shoes if you were out of commission for two months? In big companies, there are enough procedure manuals and people to fill a hole if an employee is out. But few small businesses have such luxuries--especially when the person missing is the owner.

Kathryn Morrison was hoping to free herself from operational tasks when she asked her husband, Bob Brummond, to join her public relations firm, SunStar ( http://www.isunstar.com), last year. With Brummond managing the day-to-day operations, Morrison hoped to spend more time with her company's money management and mutual fund clients. She certainly had no intention of leaving Brummond alone at the helm of the $2 million company just weeks later, when she flew off to Texas for two months--even though that's exactly what she did.

But it wasn't a pleasure trip that took Morrison away from her Alexandria, Va.-based firm. It was a phone call from an Austin, Texas, hospital informing her that her sister, Olivia Ray, had suffered a severe heart attack. Within hours, Morrison was on her way to Texas, where she would spend the next several weeks glued to her sister's bedside, while doctors held out little hope for recovery.

"If somebody had said to me then, ?Your business is going to go bankrupt,' I'd have said, ?What business?' " recalls Morrison, who started SunStar in 1991.

In fact, during those early weeks when Ray barely clung to life, Morrison says she never even asked her husband how the business was going. "I didn't want to hear about it. I came to the hospital at 7 in the morning, and sometimes I was still there at 11 or 12 at night. It was exhausting, and there was just nothing left of me."

Fortunately, Brummond and SunStar's senior account executives kept the company on track. Morrison says she was particularly pleased with how well they managed year-end financial matters, creating profit-loss statements and financial forecasts that enabled her to make strategic decisions about capital expenditures and bonuses during a weekend trip home in late December. However, it was mid-January before Morrison was able to focus on her business again, after it became clear Ray was going to recover.

As hard as it was being away from her company for so long, Morrison says her forced absence probably made her husband's transition into the business easier. Otherwise, Morrison admits, it would have been tougher for her to move from overseeing operations to working more with clients and journalists.

"Bob is an excellent manager of people, and he's great with finances. But he didn't know much about our business," she says.

"I think had I stayed here, I would have had a tough time handing responsibilities over to him. I think I would have wanted to micromanage."

When life is on pause
Until last summer, Steve Campbell had never been away from his video rental store in Chatham, N.Y., for more than a few days at a time. There was always so much to do, and with just three full-time employees besides himself, Campbell couldn't imagine how Video Visions would get along without him. He certainly can now. But it took a motorcycle accident that incapacitated him for weeks to show him just how well his employees could function without him.

"I was in the hospital for eight days," says Campbell, whose accident left him with two collapsed lungs, broken ribs and a broken shoulder. "I was hooked to tubes and everything. There was no way I could come into work, and for a couple of weeks after that, I just couldn't function."

Fortunately, Campbell's employees were willing to do whatever it took to keep the store open, including working extra hours and taking on most of their boss's duties.

"None of us ever panicked, we just did what we had to do. We're like a family," says Linda Meeham, who has worked at Video Visions for 16 years. Meeham took the call from the hospital after the accident when Campbell couldn't reach his wife.

The family atmosphere made the employees feel better about making decisions in Campbell's absence. "We know what he expects and what he wants us to do," says employee Heather Graham. "We do it when he's here, and when he's gone."

When Campbell finally was able to put in an appearance at the store four weeks after his accident, he was surprised to discover that most of his customers never realized he was gone.

"I took that as a compliment to my employees," says Campbell, who started the business 20 years ago and has seen several national chain video rental stores come and go in his town. "They kept in contact with me. But they really ran the business by themselves."

Serendipity is to thank for the seamless transition of power in what was an abrupt and unexpected absence. A few weeks before his wreck, Campbell taught his employees several accounting, ordering and video-editing duties-tasks he'd always handled exclusively. He started the tutorials mostly to give employees something else to do.

"People who wait on customers behind a counter all day can get bored," he says.

Who could have guessed how vital those teaching sessions would be just weeks later. "If I hadn't taught them those basic things, my business probably wouldn't have been able to keep going while I was out."

And the employees appreciate learning something new.

"I admire him for showing us this side of the business," says Meeham. "He doesn't just take it all on himself."

For Campbell, the rewards of seeing his business function without him paid off more than he planned.

"It worked, but it also had an unexpected payback because they were able to go on without me," says Campbell. "Now I could go fishing for a month, if I wanted to!"

Overcoming obstacles
Joseph Cooperstein is owner of Permark Inc. ( http://www.permark.com ), an Edison, N.J., company that specializes in manufacturing pigmentation products used by plastic surgeons. He understands the temptation to micromanage. However, he's not one to indulge in it himself.

"You have to learn to delegate," says Cooperstein. "You have to trust the people you hire. Give them some guidelines, and once you've given them the guidelines, don't stand over them and do their job for them."

It's a philosophy that has enabled Cooperstein to grow his business 13 out of the 14 years he's owned his company despite suffering multiple health problems between 1992 and 1998, including a heart attack, a stroke, kidney failure and two kidney transplants.

"I count my blessings," says Cooperstein, who admits that had he not bought Permark before his health problems began, he probably would have ended up on disability. Instead, with the help of his wife, who had joined the company not long after he purchased it in 1990, and his daughter, an attorney who joined the firm after her father's heart attack, Cooperstein was able to keep his position as company president and contribute to the firm's growth from a $350,000 organization with three employees to a nine-person company with revenues approaching $2 million.

But it did require a lot of flexibility and adjustments. For instance, for two years, Cooperstein administered his own dialysis four times a day, which forced him to give up traveling to trade shows, limit his office hours, and adapt to working from home by phone and computer.

Cooperstein attributes his company's success to two factors: careful planning and well-trained employees. "Every year, we do a total review of the prior year," he says. "We then write a plan on what goals we expect to achieve in the coming year."

In addition, Cooperstein sees to it that every job in his company is covered by at least two people, and sometimes three. That way, there's always someone to fill in when an employee is ill, on vacation or out of the office for some other reason.

"About the only responsibility that I've never given up is signing checks," says Cooperstein. "But I've even backed that up by allowing both my wife and my daughter to sign checks when I'm not here."

Today, Cooperstein is back on the job and in good health. "For the last six-and-a-half years, I've had no dialysis and no down time. It was a gift of life."

How to Weave Your Own Safety Net
Put yourself in the shoes of the small-business owners in this story. What would happen if you were unexpectedly gone from your business for an extended period of time? If you've made the right strategic choices, your business could fare better than you expect, says Brad Forsythe, risk management consultant and author of Bulletproof Your Business. Below are Forsythe's top tips for minimizing potential risks:

1. Plan for realistic growth. Don't expand the scope of your company beyond what can be controlled by your partners, employees or family members. "You need to expand sufficiently so that the resulting larger company is able to carry the cost of a person who is qualified to fill in, at least temporarily, for the owner," says Forsythe.

2. Keep your cash flow flexible. "Sooner or later, it's all going to come down to cash flow," says Forsythe. A company with a lot of fixed assets may have a tougher time surviving if the owner's absence triggers a business slump. Companies with more financial flexibility may find it easier to implement cost-cutting measures and prevent disaster.

3. Write it down. Although cross-training someone to assume your key responsibilities is a good idea, you don't necessarily have to go that far, says Forsythe. Instead, create a written description of your job processes for partners or employees. Be sure to update it annually.

Web Extras: Learn more on planning for unexpected absences in the "Web Extras" section of http://www.NFIB.com/toolsandtips