15: Business Succession Planning with Swedish Death Cleaning
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Welcome to episode 15 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking about Swedish Death Cleaning as it pertains to your business.
When I first heard this definition of Swedish death cleaning. That it's a practice that involves decluttering and organizing one's possessions with a goal of simplifying one's life and reducing the burden of loved ones after one's passing. I thought to myself. How can this be Swedish death cleaning? When my Irish father was practicing that for years.
Now, this might be another episode where many people are going to hit pause, because whenever I talk about preparing for the end of life, Whether it's getting your affairs in order, putting your will together, preparing for an estate. Anything like that people tend to shrink and they think to themselves,
But if I do that, I'm going to end up dying. It's almost like they feel like they're manifesting it, but I can tell you that simply isn't true. personally, I've had a will for at least 30 years. I've done estate planning, but the reason for this episode is the one thing that I have been procrastinating on is doing this cleanup or preparing my business to be manageable for anyone who might need to take over.
I've always been telling people that you don't want to burden your loved ones with stuff in the end and those of us with the business really need to be thinking about this with all of our business affairs.
So today I'm going to talk about some steps that you can take that will help you Swedish Death Clean your business.
The first thing is to streamline your physical space. I always talk about this declutter declutter, declutter. I am a broken record when it comes to it. But it is so important and this is very true for your business too. So when we're talking about our physical space, if you've got an excess of office supplies or you have an excess of files that you no longer need, start chipping away at that stuff. Think about, and this is where I lose a lot of people but think about your loved ones going through and having to make sense of it all. If they've got a nice, clean, clear, organized space to work with, it's going to help a lot.
So the second thing is, and this is part of your physical space, but it's also digital . Get control of that paper and get control of those digital files.
Make sure that your files are organized. This isn't something that can be done all in one day if you're in complete disarray but this is something that you can work towards, because remember, as we're doing this, we can never start early enough. Don't worry, chip away and make this your goal.
Okay. The third thing would be to identify any key personnel. And what do I mean by this? This would be who is going to be responsible for all of your stuff after your passing. Now if you've already prepared. outside of your business life with a will and estate. You may already have this built in, but if not, you want to think about, who's going to take over your business affairs. So just identify this person. This could be a family member. You could use an outside person. Maybe you already have a partner, or maybe you have a business colleague who understands your business, who could help during this time.
Even if you make a list of people for your loved ones to go to for guidance. People will chip in, in the end.
It doesn't have to be anything formal in place. Of course it would be wonderful if we could build them a roadmap. That's what I'm working on and as I work through it, I'm going to document everything that I'm doing
And I'm going to be creating a checklist. That will be available to everyone.
So the fourth thing you could start doing today is setting up a document. And as you think of things put the information in there. This document could outline key partners in your business softwares that you use. bank accounts passwords and login information.
And don't worry about this being organized at this point. You just want to have a place where as you think of things, as you're going through your day and you're thinking. Okay. If I wasn't here tomorrow, what would happen with this situation? What would people need to know? And jot those things down. We can organize this all later, but you want to be able to go through your day and actually think about this and don't think of it as morbid.
Think of it as a future gift to your friends and family.
The fifth thing would be to review your finances. Take some time to review them, identify any areas where you could be more efficient. This could include identifying expenses, that could be cut or finding ways to increase revenue. Because if you take a proactive approach to your finances, this can ensure that your business is in good financial health for you now and for in the future.
Now number six is if you're a coach or you're you sell online courses or you have a membership or anything like that. Make sure that, any clients that are paying you regularly, make sure that you have something in place that will take care of them. Because if you're the person helping them and you're no longer there, they either need to be reimbursed or your business needs to be transferred to somebody else who can help them.
You really want to think about that? Think about what happens when you're gone to your clients, your members, your course, any of your courses. A lot of people will specify that people have lifetime access to their courses, which I don't recommend you using that language, but usually that means the lifetime of the person who is selling the courses.
If you've stated that, and it hasn't been clear, you want to make sure that people have a way of retaining that information. So if you're selling a course, You and it's video-based you want to be able to make sure that they can download those videos or if it's, text, whatever it is, you want to make sure that they are able to get those materials so that when your business closes down, they still have access to that.
And the seventh and final thing would be to take a look at things like if you're running ads on social media or any anywhere. as for that matter, anywhere ads are being run and that you're paying for them. You want to make sure that those are stopped. And then any memberships that you may belong to, if you belong to any associations or any networking groups, you want to make sure that they are made aware so that you're not paying for those as well.
And really what this all boils down to is inventorying everything about your business. And. You can sit down and brainstorm this, but again, like I said, you can go through this on a daily basis. When you open your laptop for the day, what do you do? Is that something that somebody would need to do? Write it down.
When you ,work with your clients, is that something somebody else could do or will it end? And if it will end, you have to make sure you have a procedure in place for those people to either stop paying you or to get reimbursed.
When you go to use a certain software, that's your reminder that, oh, I pay for this annually. Write it down. be messy about this permission to be messy, make a big list of everything and you don't have to separate it out. You don't have to say, oh, this is finance and this is this, and this is this. Just make one big list. Because again, this can all be organized once you've brainstormed as much as you possibly can and sure there may be things that will fall through the cracks and that's okay. I guarantee that you're going to get the most important things out there, and that is going to be super, super helpful.
I've been doing this process, but I'm really going to amp it up. and I'm going to document what I'm doing and I'm going to create a checklist. So keep your eye out for that.
In the meantime, if paper and digital is one of the things that you struggle with. I do have a guide.
That guide is going to be turned into a paid ebook soon. But right now, I'm still offering it for free. So you can download that at joannkrall.com/7-steps I've Put that in the show notes.
And you can download that for free. I also have an action planning course. if you want to come plan with me, if you want to do planning of this stuff, I have an actual program that walks you through my process of planning and I'm also going to be doing monthly live sessions in that product at my site.
And that link as well as a link to always book a free call with me will be in the show notes as well. And that's all I have for you today. So as always, I'm wishing you much productivity. Peace prosperity and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
