Moving Your Business Forward During the Great Pause

By Attorney, Whitney Standefer

The Waiting Place... for people just waiting. If you know Dr. Seuss, you may remember his warning against allowing yourself to become trapped by the Waiting Place. Unfortunately, Dr. Seuss could never have imagined the Great Pause of 2020.

For business owners and serial entrepreneurs, this forced Waiting Place is particularly painful and counter intuitive. If you fall into this category, you are not the type to sit around and wait for direction. You are a person who makes decisions, crafts your path, and executes your plans. You are a person of action. But now what?

Hopefully you have been lucky and been able to work from home or able to make social distancing rules work for your place of business. Perhaps you still have some faithful clients or demand for your products. But, as time goes on, it is the rare business unaffected: be it due to restrictions on trade channels or decrease in demand due to consumer economic uncertainty. Whatever the reason, you need to know two things: 1) struggling to “pivot” to the top during a historic pandemic is not a cause to

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question yourself and 2) there is still time to take advantage of the slower pace.

With almost every business I work with, be they a startup or a stalwart of the community, there are foundational tasks that have been sacrificed to the back burner in favor of more immediate production and customer responsibilities. Regardless of good intentions, the result has been the continued growth of that business without ensuring that the foundation is built to hold the weight and truly stand the test of time. Sometimes there are compliance issues risking the business to government fines. A lot of times there is no Operating Agreement or Partnership Agreement ensuring that there are mechanisms in place for the smooth operation of the business. In almost every instance, there is no succession plan to safeguard the business as it transfers from one generation to the next (one of the main reasons why 60% of second generation businesses fail). I have yet to meet a business owner who does not agree that these tasks are important. The problem is not having enough time to make them a priority over their money generating efforts. Herein lies your current opportunity: the world has hit the pause button, and you now have the time.

Now is the time to take inventory of those foundational tasks and move them to the forefront of your action plan. While they may not be what Dr. Seuss had in mind when he encouraged you to find the bright places where boom bands are playing, reach out to your attorney, CPA, and/or other advisors. Allow them to do a stress test on your operation and find the holes. In a world full of uncertainty, you can create peace of mind that when the world reopens you have placed your business in its strongest possible position.

Whitney Standefer-Smith, Attorney, is the owner and founder of Local Venture Legal, PLLC: a Chattanooga-based law firm focused on tax law, business law, and succession/estate planning. www.localventurelegal.org - whitney@localventurelegal.org