Cause of Death: My Wife Hoards Toilet Paper Like It's 2020. Your Business Can't Survive One Sick Day.

One-sentence summary: A service business with no trained, tested backup for its key employees will fail its clients the first time one of them is out, and the fix is to cross-train every critical role and run the backup before you need it.

Two people live in my house. There are somewhere between 40 and 50 rolls of toilet paper in it.

I'm not exaggerating for effect. I wish I were.

My wife, Gina, also keeps boxes upon boxes of tissues (nobody in the house has a cold), three backup bottles of dish soap, and eight boxes of the little liners for the bathroom trash can. Eight. I did the math. I'm covered for the next 10 or 11 months on pooping, throwing things away, and cleaning up afterward.

Welcome to the Customer Service Crypt. Gina's closets aren't on the table today. Her backup plan works fine. The body on the table today is the business with no backup at all for the people who matter most, whose owner acts shocked every time one of them calls in sick.

TL;DR: What Happens to Your Business If a Key Employee Quits or Calls in Sick?

If nobody else has been trained and tested in that role, the work either stops or gets done badly, and your clients feel it the same day. Calls roll to voicemail. Jobs get rescheduled. The experience you promised turns into a string of apologies. The fix is a written standard for every critical role, a named backup person for each one, and a regular drill where the backup does the job for real while the regular person is still there to catch mistakes. A backup plan nobody has run is a guess.

Key Takeaway

Your clients don't care who's out today. They care whether the experience they're paying for shows up. If that experience depends on one person, one flu season could cost you clients it took years to earn.

Executive Summary

During the 2020 toilet paper panic, people learned what happens when the supply of something they relied on vanished overnight. Most of them forgot the lesson the minute the shelves filled back up. My wife never forgot, which is why the closets in my house look like a warehouse club. Most service business owners have the opposite problem. They have no backup at all for the employees who answer the phone, run the schedule, touch the money, or hold the only copy of the passwords. This piece covers what that costs in retention and referrals, the excuse owners use to avoid fixing it, how I fixed it in my own three home service businesses, and what to do this week so one sick day doesn't cost you clients.

Quick Facts

• Crypt classification: Cause of Death

• Cause: No trained, tested backup for critical roles

• Magic Key: Standards, from my book Systematic Magic

• Who's at risk: Any service business where one person controls the phone, the schedule, the money, or the logins

• The fix: Name a backup, write the standard down, run the drill

• When to start: This week, on a slow day

Key Data

• External: U.S. toilet paper sales jumped about 213% in the week ending March 14, 2020, compared with the same week a year earlier, according to Nielsen. (Source: Associated Press, "Amid virus, humble toilet paper is suddenly a hot commodity," March 23, 2020.)

• Proprietary: My household, two people, 40 to 50 rolls of toilet paper on hand, roughly 10 to 11 months of supply.

• Proprietary: 19 years owning three home service businesses: carpet cleaning, Oriental rug washing, and mold remediation.

• Proprietary: About 90 minutes a week of my time on those three businesses today, with a GM running daily operations.

What Happened

Gina doesn't call it hoarding. She calls it being prepared.

I call it a lifestyle.

Open the right closet in my house and toilet paper falls on you. Open the cabinet under the kitchen sink and there's a bottle of dish soap in use, with three more lined up behind it like replacements waiting for the starter to pull a hamstring. The tissue boxes are stacked like somebody's planning a very sad wedding. And then there are the trash can liners. Not the big kitchen bags. The tiny ones for the little can next to the bathroom toilet. Eight boxes of them.

Gina managed a Starbucks for years. My personal theory is that somebody ran out of cups on her shift once and she never got over it. She'll deny it. The closets won't.

But the real source is obvious, and you lived through it too.

March 2020. You walked into the grocery store and the paper aisle looked like it had been looted. Bare metal shelves from one end to the other. Costco, Walmart, and Target, stores built on having more of everything than anybody could possibly buy, were cleaned out. People lined up before the doors opened. Stores started limiting how many packs you could take home. Somewhere in a parking lot, a grown man guarded a 12-pack of two-ply like it was a newborn.

According to Nielsen, toilet paper sales jumped about 213% in the week ending March 14, 2020, compared with the same week a year earlier. For a few weeks, the most valuable thing in America came on a cardboard tube.

Everybody swore they'd never get caught like that again.

Then the shelves filled back up, and almost everybody forgot.

Gina didn't forget. Six years later, she's still running her household like the next shortage is coming Thursday.

The Pivot: She's Ready for a Shortage. Your Business Isn't Ready for Tuesday.

I make fun of the closets. I'll keep making fun of the closets.

But I have to admit something. Gina has a tested backup plan for an event that happened once, six years ago. Most of the business owners I talk to have no backup plan for something that happens every single month.

Your office manager calls in sick. Your lead tech's kid comes down with the flu. Your best paralegal gives two weeks' notice. Or no notice. The only person who understands payroll goes on a cruise with no Wi-Fi.

And the whole place grinds to a halt.

Calls roll to voicemail. The schedule turns into a guessing game. Somebody digs through a desk drawer looking for a password on a sticky note. A client who's been with you for nine years calls with a simple question, waits two days for an answer, and tells his brother-in-law about it at Thanksgiving.

Here's what that costs you. The client who gets a slow, sloppy version of your business doesn't send you a complaint. He sends you nothing. No referral, no renewal, no review. He just gets a little easier for your competitor to steal. And you pay to replace him with a new client who costs far more to acquire than the old one cost to keep.

Now, I know what you're telling yourself right now.

My people aren't going anywhere. And I can't afford to pay somebody to learn a job they don't even do.

Two problems with that.

First, your people don't have to go anywhere for this to hurt you. They get sick. Their parents get sick. They take vacations, they have babies, they get called for jury duty. Being out isn't disloyal. It's being a human being, and every one of your employees is going to do it.

Second, you're already paying for the backup. You're just paying for it in the worst currency there is: lost clients, rushed jobs, and your own Saturdays. Cross-training costs you a few hours. Not having it costs you the clients who quietly stopped referring you after the week everything fell apart.

The Magic Key: A Standard Only Counts When the Usual Person Isn't There

This is Standards, one of the seven magic keys I wrote about in my book Systematic Magic. Previous Service Standards article on https://vancemorris.com/post/hubspot-disney-service-standards-order

A standard is the promise your business keeps no matter who's working that day. If your experience only happens when one specific person shows up, the standard lives in her head. And it walks out the door with her every night at five.

When I was a leader at Walt Disney World, nobody ever told a guest to come back tomorrow because somebody called in sick. Someone else knew the part, and the show went on. The guest never knew the difference. That doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen because Disney hires better people than you do. It happens because the standard is written down, the role is taught to more than one person, and the backup has done the job before the day it matters.

Proof: My Three Businesses Run on 90 Minutes of My Week

I've owned my home service businesses for 19 years: Eastern Shore Carpet Cleaning, an Oriental rug washing facility, and Maryland Mold Busters.

For a long stretch, I was the backup. For everything.

If a technician was out, I was in the van. If the office was short, I was answering the phone between jobs. I had a job with a really expensive truck and my name on the side of it. (I'd love to tell you I figured this out early. I didn't. I figured it out tired.)

Today I spend about 90 minutes a week on those three companies. My GM runs them.

That didn't happen because I found a magical GM. It happened because I built the backup on purpose. Every critical role got written down. Every critical role got a second person. And then I tested it, by stepping out and letting the backup run things while I was still close enough to catch the mistakes. Then I tested it again. I kept testing it until the businesses stopped needing me to hold them up.

The retention systems I use to keep customers coming back don't care who's on shift that day. That's the whole point.

Systems Over Heroics

Every business that runs on heroes eventually runs out of heroes.

The hero business looks great on a good day. Your office manager is a rock star. Your lead tech can fix anything. Clients love them. And every one of those clients is loyal to a person instead of to your business, which means your business is renting that loyalty, not owning it.

The system business looks a little boring by comparison. The phone gets answered the same way whether it's Kim or Dave picking it up. The estimate goes out with the same follow-up whether the lead tech is in the field or home with a fever. Boring makes money. Boring survives flu season.

So where do you start? You can't cross-train everything at once, and you don't need to. Rank your roles by how fast a client would feel the hole. In my experience, four roles go to the top of the list almost every time.

Start with the role that touches the client first, which is usually whoever answers the phone. If that falls apart, nothing else matters, because the client never gets past hello. Next is the role that touches the money: billing, collections, payroll. Clients forgive a lot. They don't forgive getting billed twice. After that, look for any role where one person holds the only copy of something, like the passwords, the vendor contacts, or the "she just knows how to do it" process for building estimates. Last, look at the role that would take you the longest to rehire. If replacing that person would take three months, you need a backup who can cover three months.

Then use the same test on every role you pick. Has the backup done this job, for real, with real clients, in the last 90 days? If the answer is no, you have a name on a piece of paper and nothing else.

Gina, for the record, knows her backup works. She's watched the toilet paper roll out of that closet one pack at a time for six years.

Recommended Actions If This Were My Business

Monday: Write down the one person whose absence would hurt your clients most this week. Be honest. It's usually the person you'd least like to imagine being gone.

Tuesday: Sit down with that person and list the things only they know how to do. Logins, steps, the weird exceptions, the client who has to be called instead of emailed. Get it on paper.

Wednesday: Pick the backup. Choose somebody who already understands your clients, not whoever happens to have free time.

Thursday: Run the drill. The backup does one of those tasks start to finish, for real, while the regular person watches and keeps quiet. Note every place the backup got stuck.

Friday: Fix the gaps you found Thursday and put the next drill on the calendar. A backup that gets tested once a year is barely a backup.

https://vancemorris.com/post/taco-bell-lettuce-outbreak-disservification

FAQs

What happens to a small business when a key employee quits? If nobody else has been trained in that role, the work either stops or gets done poorly, and clients notice fast. Response times slip, mistakes increase, and the clients who feel it most are often your longest-standing ones. The fastest protection is a named, trained backup for every critical role.

How do I cross-train employees without slowing the business down? Start with one role and one task. Have the backup do that task for real while the regular employee watches, on a slower day. A few hours a month is enough to start, and it's far cheaper than the week everything falls apart.

Which roles should I build backups for first? Start with the role that touches the client first (usually the phone), then the role that touches the money, then any role where one person holds information nobody else has, then the role that would take longest to rehire.

How often should I test my backup plan? At least every 90 days for each critical role. If the backup hasn't done the job with real clients recently, assume they can't do it the day you need them.

What's the difference between a backup plan and a service standard? A service standard defines what the client experiences every time. A backup plan makes sure that standard holds when the usual person isn't there. You need both. A standard with no backup only works when everybody shows up.

The Verdict From the Crypt

Gina is ready for the next toilet paper apocalypse. She's got 11 months of backup sitting in the closets of a two-person house, and she knows it works.

How many days of backup does your business have?

If the honest answer is zero, the cause of death is already written. Only the date is blank.

Get My Inner Circle Free for 30 Days

If you want the rest of the systems I use to keep my own businesses running without me, join my Inner Circle. You get your first 30 days free, my printed XPerience Report, and a monthly coaching call where I dig into exactly this kind of problem with you. You also get my Disnify Your Business Toolkit as a free gift. You just pay shipping.

Grab it at vancemorris.com/toolkit before your best employee books that cruise.