Having an emergency action plan in place is necessary for all those who work at home.

For example, what would you do if you got very ill and couldn’t keep up with your work? If you’re an employee, you could call in sick. But if you’re self employed with a home business, you could end up losing business as a result. But if you have an emergency action plan in place, you can actually earn more clients because the word may spread about how professionally you handled the situation.


Before you become ill or otherwise unavailable, create a list of clients who should be contacted first and then designate someone you trust to contact them if you are unable to do so to let those clients know what’s going on. Also consider putting together a network of colleagues who can be called in to handle any projects that you still need to complete when you’re creating your emergency action plan.

Keep your emergency process simple and streamlined – and it will work. Activate your email and phone chain and delegate the work, so there’s as little disruption as possible in the work flow. Though your emergency action plan will only be needed in a rare event, having it in place BEFORE you need it will help you to rest easy, knowing others could step in if something horrible (knock on wood) should happen.

You may also consider creating a list of contacts that could help someone step into your shoes to handle billing and other paperwork. Make your emergency plan easy to access by others, such as a spouse or roommate as well as yourself.

Keep a copy in a binder in your home office, in your email, and on your home computer and let your designees know what and where it is. It should only take you a few hours to create an emergency action plan, but it will give you more peace of mind than you might ever imagine.