The Emergency Kit Every Business Owner Needs

By Rada Mills, founder of Burt + Brewington

(small.news) — Somewhere between the business name registration and the first logo draft, somebody told you to write a business plan. And they were right.

A business plan matters. It gives your idea structure, your goals a timeline, your vision something to stand on. No argument there.

A business plan only plans for the business. And you, the human being running it, loving it, sacrificing for it, pouring yourself into it late into the night, you need a plan too. I learned that the hard way.

I didn’t set out to start a skincare company. My daughter was five months old when she was diagnosed with eczema, and the fix they offered me was a topical steroid on a baby. I thought that was wild, so I said no. I went home and started making something myself. It worked.

So I made more. I handed it out to friends and family and told them to be honest with me. They loved it. That’s when I started pushing it out into the world, still not entirely sure what I had. It wasn’t until I was on a nationally syndicated radio show, watching orders come in from all over the country, that it finally hit me: I had a business.

So there I was. Two daughters under the age of three. A company I’d built out of a no I refused to swallow. The growth, the customers, all the good stuff, and all the beautiful chaos that comes with building something from the ground up. I was about a year in. Figuring it out as I went, the way most of us do. But I’d found a cadence by then. Fill the orders, feed the girls, sleep when the day let me, get up and do it all again. It wasn’t a tidy little routine, but it was mine. And it was working.

The Morning that Changed Everything

And then came the day that flipped everything upside down. My husband left for work that morning, the same as any other. He didn’t make it home that day. On his way back, he’d been in a serious car accident. So serious they had to cut him out of the car with the jaws of life. He was airlifted to the nearest trauma facility and went into surgery, almost nine hours of it, that didn’t end until the next morning. And just like that, the cadence was gone. Not gradually. Not with a warning. Instantly.

For the next forty days, my world became a hospital room. And my business? It just … stopped. Orders didn’t go out. Client communications went silent. The momentum I had spent a year building hit a wall that I hadn’t planned for, because how do you plan for the unexpected? The answer, I’ve come to learn, is that you do just that. You plan for the unexpected.

A business plan maps your business. A life plan maps the person running it. Without the second one, the first one is sitting on a foundation that hasn’t been checked. Because life, real life, will happen with or without your participation. A new baby. A spouse who gets a job offer three states away. A surgery. A parent who has a stroke and suddenly needs you full time. A divorce. A season where your body gives out and what you thought was a two-day cold turns into two weeks of the flu.

These are not edge cases. These are Tuesdays. And the one thing certain about a Tuesday is that we never know what it’s going to bring.

A business plan can’t prepare you for that. A life plan can.

What a Life Plan Actually Is, and Isn’t

A life plan does not have to be a ten-page document that takes three weeks to write and lives in a binder you never open. It can be simple. It should be honest. And it needs to be specific enough that someone else could pick it up and know what to do if you couldn’t tell them yourself.

At its core, a life plan answers a few essential questions:

What are your non-negotiables? The things that don’t move regardless of what the business needs: your health, your family, your sanity. Name them. Write them down. Give them the same weight you’d give a revenue goal.

What’s your overflow protocol? Because the lines between work and life will blur. They always do, especially when you love what you do. The life plan doesn’t pretend otherwise. It just builds in room for the overflow instead of letting it swallow you whole.

What’s your emergency plan? Who is your point person if you can’t make a decision? What does a client communication look like if you need to step away? What gets paused first, and for how long? You don’t have to have every answer. You have to have an answer. Even a draft of a statement that says there has been a family emergency, I am asking for grace, I will update you as soon as I am able. That’s something. That’s more than nothing. And in a crisis, more than nothing is everything.

The Identity Overlap Nobody Talks About

Being a small business owner, especially in those early years: you and your business become the same thing. The business wears your face. It speaks in your voice. Its reputation is your reputation. And when something happens to you, personally, privately, painfully, it lands on the business too, whether you’re ready for it or not.

One of the most clarifying exercises I recommend is simply writing out two lists. What falls under the business? What falls under personal? And then, honestly, what overlaps? What lives in both worlds? Because those items that sit in the middle, the ones you’re not sure how to categorize, those need a home. Give them one. Decide in advance what percentage of that thing is business and what’s personal, so that when you’re in the middle of a crisis, you’re not trying to make that call with a depleted mind and a heavy heart.

Think of it like an emergency kit. You should have one in your home, your travel bag, your car. You get the picture.

A good one is stocked with the essentials. Gauze pads, bandages in every size, antiseptic, tape, scissors, gloves, the works. Having it feels responsible. Feels prepared.

The catch is, a kit only works if you keep it stocked. You have to open it every so often, see what’s expired, replace what you’ve used, make sure it’s actually ready.

But if you open it in an actual emergency and find one small circular Band-Aid when you needed gauze pads and a tourniquet? That is more frustrating than not having a kit at all. Because you thought you were covered.

A life plan works the same way. You build it before you need it, you keep it current, and you pray you never have to open it. But the day you do, everything you need is already there.

What No Plan Will Cost You

I want to be honest with you here, because you deserve that more than you deserve another tidy list of tips.

Not having a life plan will cost you. And not just financially, though it will cost you there too. It can cost you your relationships. Your reputation. Your mental health, your physical health, your emotional reserves. It can cost you the very presence you will need to give to the people who need you most in that moment.

You most in that moment. And in the worst cases, it can cost you the business itself — everything you poured in, gone, and you still come out the other side having lost on the personal end too.

The goal of a life plan is not to prevent hard things from happening. Lord knows I wish it could. But no plan stops the phone call, the diagnosis, the accident. What it does is make sure that when one of them comes, you already know what matters and what can wait, so you can be fully present for the thing that actually needs you.

Write the business plan. Then write the life plan.

The business plan is built for an ordinary Tuesday. The life plan is built for the one that isn’t.

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