Picture this: your firm is about to close a massive deal, one that has been worked on for weeks at a time. Tragically, your salesperson calls out sick. There's no way they can work, so your closing date gets kicked down the road.

Unfortunately, time kills deals all the time. Your prospective clients change their minds and the deal is lost.

Entrepreneurship is full of ups and downs.

When your business's core operations are completely reliant on one person, you're in a perilous position. What happens when that one person isn't able to work? What if they up and leave with no warning?

How can you prevent something bad happen when building a team in your small business?

What is Team Redundancy?

Team redundancy is an important part of growing your small business.

Redundancy is the inclusion of an extra component that's not strictly necessary for something to function.

For example, Amazon has several server redundancies to ensure that its web services can remain up and function without interruption. This allows thousands of software companies to rely on Amazon Web Services for their software hosting; they know it will remain consistently active.

Redundancy is not exclusive to tech companies and server hosting.

It's well-documented that teams who create skill redundancy can better avoid disastrous situations in which a single critical member holds all the cards.

To build effective redundancy, it's important to have your organization's processes well-documented. That way, any team member with the necessary skills can easily and effectively pick up vital tasks that need to be accomplished!

Sharing Skills

Every small business consists of several "departments." There's Sales, Marketing, Operations, Customer Success, and Finance. Whether you're a single entrepreneur or a team of 50, tasks get done based on the departmental needs of the business.

When you're a brand new small business owner, the needs of your business can feel overwhelming. Often, every task is reliant on you alone as the sole proprietor!

When you begin to hire and expand your team, you offload responsibilities to your new team members.

In order to build redundancy into your business, you need to educate and share vital tasks with your team members. When only one person knows how to complete a vital task, you run the risk of a catastrophe if that person leaves or is sick.

Instead, educating the relevant team members on how to take on vital tasks is essential. Diversifying the number of people that can do a job creates redundancy and reduces the potential for failure.

Having a team of outsourced accounting experts ultimately helps your business thrive. Instead of completely relying on one person to handle the financial aspects of your business, work with a virtual CFO or financial business coach to ensure that your business stays operational at all times.