Ep 6: How to prepare for the unexpected in life and business

Just recently I’ll share a personal story. My mom’s husband passed away unexpectedly. He was terminal. He had kidney disease. They thought he had a couple of years left and unexpectedly, he passed away. So my mom was not prepared for life to happen in this way. And her life kind of got turned upside down. As a person who’s extremely organized, I tried to have a talk with my mom and let her know before this day comes because they knew it would come eventually is “how are your bills? Do you know how to pay your bills? Do you know the passwords into your accounts?”

My mom’s husband had a vehicle that he had just purchased. She didn’t even know the car payment, how much the car payment was, or how it was paid for. She didn’t know the bank accounts, how many there were, what banks she banked with? She had an idea, but it was very vague. He did not have a will set up or burial plans or anything to that effect. So when he passed away, she was kind of blindsided with all these things and it took her about a month. It’s been about a month, month and a half now, and she’s now finally getting organized to know how she pays her bills, where the money is and, that sort of thing.

So how could careful planning have made a difference in my mom’s life? I think it would’ve made a huge difference, and that’s why I urge all of you to plan for the unexpected. Plan in advance. That’s why we have life insurance, health insurance, because you just never know what’s going to happen. But other than insurance, day-to-day activities. If you’re married, have a spouse, do you know how decisions are made? Do you know how the bills are paid? Do you know the ongoings of your home and how that takes place? Some people make decisions. Some people do the bills and you got to know each person’s role because God forbid something happened, we’re not promised tomorrow. You want to be prepared for that. So what do you do to plan for life’s unexpected moments?

“Life happens” in business too. Are you prepared?

Now, this rings true in business as well. As I say “life happens” and not just in personal life, but it also happens in business. We have some unexpected things pop up with us and how do we plan for the unexpected? We have systems in place over at Paper Protectors to minimize the negative effects of unplanned situations.

We recently had one of our box trucks blow a transmission. And within the same 48 hour period after that, we had one of our sales cars, had a bad clutch. So both vehicles were out of commission for two weeks. What we do to prepare for that is we have backup vehicles. It’s not always easy to do financially. But we have a backup truck where once the transmission went in the one, the next truck was on the road the following day. So our customers were not inconvenienced in any way or even aware that this had happened.

​Same thing in the field. We may have pressure washer hoses blow. We’ve got spare pieces of equipment, spare hoses. We’ve got all those things on each of our trucks and God forbid something break down we’re up and running quickly. We also have a mobile mechanic that we use for our trucks, as well as our equipment, two different mechanics. And we have a digital platform to dispatch jobs and coordinate jobs with each other.

How do you plan for unexpected occurrences? What course of action do you take?