What Is a Single Point of Failure in a Small Business?
A single point of failure in a small business is any person, process, or system whose absence would halt critical operations. For most solo founders and small business owners, that single point of failure is themselves — the owner. Identifying and reducing it is the foundation of any real business continuity plan.
Last year, I got hit by a car
You might remember that around this time last year, I wrote a book. Or not, since I made a super big deal about it for a month and then disappeared.
Last June, after rising at 5 AM for East Coast book promo, I celebrated by having my teeth cleaned. (It’s really difficult to reschedule.) I drove off through Pasadena to meet a friend for a celebratory drink, where we would find out the book had become a bestseller.
I had spent a year trying to condense my business ethos into words. My contribution to The Wisdom Collection anthology was the start of what was to be a period of growth and investment in my business.
But instead of celebrating, I found myself wondering why my iPhone was threatening to call 911. Why people were gathered on the corners to yell at me to get out of my car (which was leaking many colorful fluids). Why a police officer was asking whether I wanted him to call EMS.
In retrospect, that’s a wild question to ask the person who just hit their head. I knew I had a headache, but I wasn’t bleeding, and I could move my limbs.
I gave my statement. I called my friend to leave happy hour to fetch me. A kind shopkeeper insisted the police let me sit down and drink the bottle of water she had brought me.
The police were there to protect the city, take the report, move the vehicles, and keep things contained. With the evidence whisked away, I found myself sitting alone on the curb at Green Street and El Molino Avenue. I got an alert: the book was officially a number one international bestseller. Yaaaaay.
At the beginning, I thought this was temporary
I was estimating a couple weeks of disruption and then I’d get to continue my life — that was the frame. I woke up in the night to text a friend, my remote concussion protocol. I felt awful. At 7 AM, I scraped myself together to make the three short bestseller videos my publisher requested, and asked Paige to reschedule my day. At urgent care, I learned nothing major was torn or broken. The rest had to wait until the swelling went down. The headline was “temporary.”
This was reinforced by different doctors. Two weeks. Four more weeks. Try this for six weeks.
“This is temporary. Give it time.”
The problem is that “temporary” is a holding pattern.
Temporary says status quo. Holding off on getting help, deferring decisions, and telling yourself you’ll be able to catch up soon.
And that’s what I did. I kept waiting to feel “better,” like the experts said I would.
But my weeks turned into months, and still, I heard the solution was time, even though mine was a zero sum game of trading off my four functional hours a day across work, medical appointments, and parenting. My pain got worse and my capacity kept shrinking.
So much for temporary.
My life started to look like a shell game
Winning was completely impossible.
By mid-October, I’ll be honest, I felt like a loser. The clients who signed on in the spring were still waiting to wrap their engagements. I was falling behind and failing everybody. And I hadn’t recruited backup for my role because I had been told this would be a non-issue. I tried to AI my way out of it, but between the learning curve and the quality control, it didn’t save time.
I started stuffing work into every corner of my life to keep the business going. If I had one hour of focused activity in me on a Saturday morning, I’d choose work instead of cleaning up the house, putting the tags on the car, or hanging out with my kid. Because I had to. It’s the only way the work math would math. This business was designed for me to work about 32 hours over four days a week. Pretty good, all things considered. But 4 x 7 = 28. Repeat that for a few weeks and the deficit piles up, with no days off.
I counted on the period from Christmas to New Year’s as a rest and recovery window. It didn’t happen. I was too far behind and had too many year-end tasks. I had big “I’m not even supposed to be here today” energy while I slogged through the break, resentful, exhausted.
After the holidays, I went back to my doctor. She told me again I was fine and that I didn’t need a big expensive test like an MRI. She ordered physical therapy. The wait for a facility that would take my insurance was nine weeks.
There’s nothing wrong. Just give it time.
I had a complete meltdown.
It became impossible to ignore: I might not get better. This might not be temporary. I couldn’t work like I did prior to my accident, and the business wouldn’t survive if I pretended I could.
Something had to change
Up until that point, I had designed my team to optimize my productivity, not replace me. That’s what a lot of business owners do. Yes, they could keep the schedule moving, post on social media, keep the client process going. They didn’t, however, have the domain knowledge to do the actual work.
So I had to make a plan. I had to find people with specific expertise who were willing to use their conventional skills in the unconventional way we do things in this company. After that, I could figure out what I could do best with the time I do have available.
How am I today?
Honestly, I’m tired. I’m perpetually sore from 12 weeks of physical therapy, but it’s finally making a difference. I can work 6 x 5 = 30 hours, which maths (with a bit of weekend), as long as I take a structured break and do recovery exercises every 90 minutes.
I’m still angry. I’m still dealing with it.
But now that I actually have some backup, I have glimmers of excitement about what I can do next. I have a little space to tinker. I’m having more sales conversations because I’m less worried about how we’ll actually deliver. I’ve been able to venture outside and talk to other humans who are building their own companies.
And as I’ve brought in new support, it’s changed what’s possible for me.
Why am I sharing my experience?
Because most of the time when people tell stories about a major life event derailing their best laid plans, the ending is pithy and tidy. Everything’s wrapped up in a nice bow, everyone’s healed, and the learnings could be published as case studies.
That’s not how life works, particularly when you run a business that depends on you.
The work still shows up. Your clients still have needs. Your kid still needs dinner. And you don’t get to pause the whole machine while you “process.” So the real question isn’t “how do I stay positive?” It’s “how do I build a business that can keep functioning when life happens to me?”
It’s tempting to say the universe redirected me with a t-bone collision. But honestly, this is some Grade A bullshit. I don’t want to be doing any of this. I did what I was supposed to do and I got a long, painful recovery that, three MRIs later, comes with zero shortcuts and what will probably be a multi-year lawsuit against a well-resourced municipal government. This is hard, disruptive, and expensive.
But, this business no longer has a single point of failure named Jill James.
I wish the wrath of an F-150 on no one. But if you count on your business, it might be worth a moment this summer to consider where you can create redundancy.
Start small and start honest. Pick the one or two responsibilities that would create the biggest mess if you couldn’t touch them for as much as 30 days. Write down what “good” looks like. Have a real talk with an insurance professional or financial planner. Take one step toward having some backup.
It might not be a catastrophe. It might be a vacation, a baby, or an invitation to speak somewhere that requires you to be mostly off the grid for a few days. Or the most epic week of elementary school culmination festivities, announced 48 hours in advance.
Don’t try to get it perfect. Your only goal is to work toward building a business that can keep paying you and serving your clients without requiring you to be indestructible.
Start-stop-keep: life happens edition
Ready to get started? Great, here’s what you do:
START treating “temporary” challenges as a cue to build backup anyway: pick the one or two responsibilities that would create the biggest mess if you couldn’t touch them for 30 days, and take one step toward coverage.
STOP running your business on the assumption that things will be back to normal in a couple of weeks — that belief is how you end up keeping everything lean and postponing the help you actually need.
KEEP designing toward resilience: document what “good” looks like, build support that covers more than the calendar and inbox, and reduce your role as the single point of failure.
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