When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…you want to really be leaning on that person to know, hey, you are kind of in the driver’s seat if I’m not here.”
“…if everything is riding on you, that’s where you start to feel like you can’t step away.”
“…getting all this on paper, making a checklist, identifying these people, simple, simple things are going to be game changing for you.”
Episode highlights
Why your absence should not grind everything to a halt
Lia opens with a design agency story: three creative directors owned everything, and when one was out, their projects stopped cold. No backup reviewer, no briefed stand-in, no plan. Clients nearly missed deadlines. That scenario plays out in businesses of every size, and a coverage plan is the insurance policy that prevents it. The goal is not to hand everything off permanently. It is to have a framework so work that has to move forward actually does.
Step 1: Categorize your tasks by cadence
Before you can hand anything off, you need to know what actually has to get done and when. Lia suggests starting with a simple Google Doc and listing your repeatable tasks in three buckets: daily, weekly, and monthly.
A concrete example: a law firm owner does client billing once a week. If she is out for a day or two, her paralegals can cover most things. But if she is out two weeks, billing has to be formally handed off. Knowing the cadence tells you the threshold at which coverage becomes critical, and who needs to be looped in.
Step 2: Define a clear chain of command for decisions
The second piece is deciding who makes the calls when you cannot. Lia is direct here: pick a person, give them air cover in front of the whole team, and brief them on how you actually make decisions.
That briefing matters. Share the criteria you use for approvals, flag anything that has come up before, and tell them to act as you for the duration. Then make sure the rest of the team knows Jennifer (or whoever) is in the driver’s seat, not just a placeholder waiting for the boss to return.
This is also different from your standard delegation approach. When you delegate for growth, you want people solving problems their own way. When you are handing off temporary decision-making, it is okay to say: here is exactly how I do this, please replicate it. That clarity sets the stand-in up for success and keeps the team moving.
Step 3: Make the list of things only you can do as short as possible
This is the most revealing part of the exercise. What are the tasks that literally no one else in your business can handle? Lia says to look hard at that list and ask two questions: how time-sensitive is each item, and what happens if it does not get done while you are gone?
Some things can wait (hiring decisions, for example, can often pause a week). Others cannot (a safety incident at a gym or med spa needs a decision now). For the time-sensitive ones, identify an emergency contact, whether that is a fractional HR person, a consultant, or a trusted partner who can be reached if the situation is truly urgent.
The longer your only-you list is, the more trapped you feel. Lia is clear: if everything is riding on you, you cannot take a spontaneous weekend trip, you cannot be present at your kid’s soccer tournament, and you definitely cannot be unreachable in a real emergency without the whole business feeling it.
What this exercise unlocks beyond the coverage plan
Building this plan does something else: it clears cognitive load. When you stop carrying the mental weight of feeling like it all depends on you, you get brain space back. Space to grow the business, space to delegate things you realize do not need to sit with you at all, or simply space to go to lunch on a Friday without your phone glued to your hand.
The coverage plan is not just a document. It is the beginning of getting out of the weeds.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
There’s a number of reasons that we need to have a coverage plan in place, which means everybody on the same page around what to do when you’re not there. And this can be tough as a business owner, as a team leader, especially when there’s a set of things that really only you can handle or that you’re doing that your team doesn’t have a ton of visibility into. And with a coverage plan, I don’t mean you have to hand all of that off all the time or have a ton of visibility into it.
But you have a framework around really what happens with work that you’re not doing when you’re not there, especially with stuff that has to move forward. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.
From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, I want to talk about coverage plans. Yes, yes, you need one. And today I’m gonna talk about how to set that up. Now, you know, there’s things going around right now, colds and sicknesses, and maybe you just want to be able to step away spontaneously with and know that everything your team is going well, set up for success.
There’s a number of reasons for that. There’s a number of reasons that we need to have a coverage plan in place, which means everybody on the same page around what to do when you’re not there. And this can be tough as a business owner, as a team leader, especially when there’s a set of things that really only you can handle, or that you’re doing that your team doesn’t have a ton of visibility into. And with a coverage plan, I don’t mean you have to hand all of that off all the time or have a ton of visibility into it, but you have a framework around really what happens with work that you’re not doing when you’re not there, especially with stuff that has to move forward.
And so I wanted to share today three things to think about. But before we dive into that, let’s talk about why this is so important. Well, I think when our team members know that there’s a set of work that maybe can’t get done when you’re not there and they don’t feel like, you know, there’s any visibility into what happens if you’re not here, I think people start to wonder. I’ve been on teams where I felt like, gosh, you know, this one person is carrying so much weight.
Like if they’re not here, how does this business move forward? I was in a design agency where it was owned by three creative directors who really ran the show completely. They did the business development, client acquisition. They ran the creative reviews. They did all the approvals. And when one of them wasn’t there, all of that person’s projects came to a grinding halt. And if they had been out a week or two, that would have really thrown off our project timelines.
And in that situation, we really worked hard. The project management team and the operation teams really worked hard to make sure we knew, hey, is there a backup creative director that can review this? How do we make sure that other person gets up to speed on the project so that we don’t have to tell our clients, hey, there was an emergency and we’re just not gonna deliver on time, especially if it was something for a product launch or something that we really don’t have flexibility on the timeline.
So this is gonna create some, you know, sense of ease and calm in your team member that, hey, we have things figured out if someone was to be out. Now, you know, a coverage plan, it sounds kind of like an insurance policy, and that’s really what it is. That, again, when you are not there, can’t be there for whatever reason, everybody knows what to do, okay? You have stuff moving forward. So the three things that I wanna talk about today, first, you know, having a really clear understanding of what has to get done in a given day, in a given week, in a given month, things like that.
Because when you categorize work in that way, you know, okay, if I have to be gone this amount of time, what has to move forward? For example, a client of mine owns a law firm, and she does her client billing once a week. So if she was out for a day or two, then some of her paralegals could take over some of their responsibilities. But if she was out for two weeks, we know that, well, billing is something that she’d have to hand off.
So distinguishing between what are the daily tasks, the weekly tasks, and the monthly tasks, that’s going to really set you up for success. Same thing if you’re running an agency and you do, you know, client reviews every Friday, let’s say, or on a certain cadence. Well, again, if you’re out a day or two, you don’t have to notify the clients. But if you’re going to be missing a few of those reviews and you’re the one that usually runs those presentations, that’s when maybe you need to have a team member get ready to run those or notify the client you’re going to be out.
So this set of things, you know, I would just jot it down, start a Google Doc, write down, you know, what are the typical things that you handle that really are on your plate on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and on a monthly basis. And that’s going to give you a sense of what kinds of coverage plans you really want to make. Now, by coverage plan, I just mean a checklist, OK? I don’t mean writing a 30-page document about everything that goes on in your day, but saying, hey, you know, every Saturday I do billing and here’s what’s involved.
Every Friday we have that client meeting. Every, you know, end of day Friday, we plan the work for the next week. We go through the Asana board, whatever it looks like, right? So you have a sense of what are these repeatable tasks that you are managing that potentially somebody else could take over. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager.
I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too, even when I had been managing people for a while, because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet. Head to LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results.
There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard right freaking now. LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. Now, the next thing we want to do is really have a clearly defined chain of command around approvals and decisions when you can’t be that decision maker. In some situations, this is, you know, your executive assistant that really has a lot of visibility into the work you do. Maybe it’s your ops director. Maybe it’s another person in a senior role. Whoever it is, you want to really be leaning on that person to know, hey, you are kind of in the driver’s seat if I’m not here.
And then making sure the rest of your team is aware of that. So this is really critical when you are handing off decisions that you had made in the past to give that person air cover. Say, hey, I am tasking Jennifer with when I’m not here. She makes the calls. Think of her as me. When she says to do something, you got to do it. So that that Jennifer person is set up for success and people don’t go, I’m just going to wait till the boss gets back.
I don’t really know here. So part of your coverage plan is communicating. These are the people I’ve put in charge of these different areas. And so that’s something that can also serve to get you a little bit out of the weeds. You may find, hey, you know what? I kind of want Jennifer always to be making the calls in that different area. Or you might say, hey, I actually, you know, Jennifer’s awesome and I really want her owning her space and I still have to make the calls, but she is the right person to make the calls when I’m not here.
Right. So either way, it doesn’t mean you hand those things off forever. And then not only do you give air cover with the rest of your team, but you sit down with that person. You say, hey, here is the criteria I use to make the decisions. Here’s what I look for when I’m making approvals. OK, here are some of the things that have happened in the past that just to be aware of so that when people come and do with these things, what to think through.
So you not only want to set up the whole team to be trusting that person to make the calls, but you want to set that team member who’s going to be making the calls, who’s going to be taking over that chain of command for success so they know how to kind of act as you in that situation. Now, when we’re delegating, I love to give people the freedom to solve problems in their own way and to say, how would you solve this?
Right. This is a really big part of someone feeling sense of ownership, taking leadership. But that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case when you’re handing off a temporary decision. So I really think it is OK to say, hey, for this day or week that I’m out, here’s the kind of decisions that I make. Here’s how I approach it. And I want you to really act as me. There’s other opportunities for you to bring your own flavor into it.
And this isn’t the one because this is really a short term kind of quick. We’re just kind of getting together, solving this thing right now and then moving forward. So distinguishing between the two saying, hey, I totally trust you to make decision on your own. I totally trust you to act as me. This is that second one. And that’s what I need from you in this moment. Clarifying that, I think, is really important as well. The third thing we want to do is to really understand and this kind of ties with number one, like what has to get done on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
But what really are those things that only, only, only, only you can do? And I talk about this when I talk about delegating work, because we really want to make that list as small as possible. What are the things that literally nobody else in your business can do? Maybe it’s something around financial reporting. Maybe it’s something around strategy. Maybe it’s something around making hiring decisions. And then look at that list and say, hey, back to that daily, weekly, monthly.
You know, of these things that I only can do, if I was gone for this period of time, would this make or break the business? And some things would, some things wouldn’t. And of the things that are like, hey, I really need somebody to drive that forward when I am gone. So let’s say like taking, you know, hiring and firing decisions. Let’s say that’s something that only you can do, like making the final call. If only you can do that, then saying, hey, you know what?
For hiring, if I were to be gone, we’re going to pause. We’re going to pause those because, you know, I’ll be back in a number of days or a week, whatever. But firing, if there was some kind of emergency and let’s say you run a med spa or a wellness clinic or a gym, right? And there’s some sort of safety issue and somebody has to have that action right away. Having someone on deck that can help make that call for you is going to be really important.
Maybe you have a fractional HR person. Maybe you have an HR consultant you’re working with and you have that person teed up of, hey, if I can’t be here, I’d like for you to make the call. Maybe you have an emergency that people can actually get ahold of you and say, hey, what happened here? But with the things that really only you can do, you want to figure out, is it super, super time sensitive? Can it wait?
Or if I have to make that call, let’s say you work in a PR agency or another kind of agency or you’re an event planner or you have a marketing company or something like that where you have to make a big purchase and that’s something you have to prove. What is the threshold of where it’s got to go to you or someone in your network, like where someone can call an emergency contact almost? And if you are totally unreachable, what can people do?
Who do they go to to make that call? And again, just like with this chain of command, this isn’t someone that regularly makes the calls. This is that like SOS. We’re in an emergency state. We have to get an answer on this. Who do we ask? And that’s going to be a small list, a small list of things that only you decide, only you do, that has to be done in that moment. And so it’s really an important exercise to make sure that list is small as possible because if everything is riding on you, that’s where you start to feel like you can’t step away.
You can’t take that spontaneous weekend trip away or you can’t be gone all day for a kid’s soccer tournament. You can’t be, if your kid was in the hospital, you can’t be there. If you were in the hospital, something like that. That’s where we start to create this stress and this pressure that I can’t step away from the phone, the laptop that starts to kind of eat you up inside. And that’s why getting all this on paper, making a checklist, identifying these people, simple, simple things are going to be game changing for you.
Because when you don’t have that cognitive load of feeling like I got to do everything, it’s all riding on me. Now you have that brain space to think about growing your business, to have more energy. And maybe in this process, and I hope so, you find there are a few things that you can delegate. And that does free up more time for you. So this exercise of creating your coverage plan is also going to start to free up space for you to reinvest in your business or to just take some space away from your business.
Maybe, right? Maybe you go to lunch with a friend every Friday instead of worrying about some of these things. Okay. So this is something that I know can be helpful to work through with somebody. So again, if this is something you’re like, ah, you know, I don’t really know how to start or I think I got this or who’s the right person, this is a perfect thing to wrestle with in our Team Whisperer monthly consulting. So that’s a program I have where for four hours a month, you have me in your back pocket for one-on-ones, for coaching, for brainstorming things with the teams, for working with your team members directly.
I got a lot of teams that team members just text or call me directly and we kind of wrestle with something to keep the business owner, to keep you kind of shielded from that until we’ve solved the problem. I also in that four hours can build out processes or kind of tools, systems like that. So this is a really great example of something that we could use in one of those sessions, work through what is that coverage plan, refine it, talk about the rollout strategy with the team and get you set up for feeling like, whew, okay, I can take some space and if an emergency happened, my business is moving forward.
Okay, so if you’re interested in learning more about Team Whisperer monthly consulting, send me an email at hello at leahgarvin.com or head to my website leahgarvin.com and set up your scale-up strategy call and we’ll just talk through it. All right, see you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What should I do to make sure my business runs smoothly when I'm out?
Start by writing down everything you handle on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. That breakdown tells you exactly what needs to keep moving if you're gone for a day versus a week versus two weeks. Some tasks can wait, but others, like weekly billing or recurring client reviews, need a clear plan. Once you know which tasks are time-sensitive, you can create a simple checklist, not a 30-page document, that tells your team what to do and who handles what while you're away.
How do I set up a chain of command so my team doesn't freeze up when I'm unavailable?
Pick one person, maybe your ops lead or a senior team member, and publicly give them authority to make calls in your absence. Tell the whole team that this person speaks for you while you're out, so no one sits around waiting for you to return. Then sit down with that person privately and walk them through how you make decisions, what criteria you use, and any past situations they should know about. The goal is for them to act as you in the short term, not to bring their own approach, just to keep things moving the way you would.
How do I figure out which decisions only I can make versus what I can hand off?
Make a list of everything that truly requires you and then make that list as small as possible. For the things that really are yours alone, ask whether each one is time-sensitive enough to stop the business if it waits. Hiring decisions might be able to pause for a week, but a safety issue at a clinic or gym cannot. For those genuine emergencies, identify a backup person in your network, a fractional HR consultant, a trusted partner, someone who can be an SOS contact if you are completely unreachable. Everything else should either be delegated or documented.
Why do I feel like I can't ever step away from my business?
That feeling usually comes from not having a coverage plan, which means everything is riding on you and you carry that mental load constantly. When there is no system in place, stepping away feels irresponsible. But once you put it on paper, assign decision-makers, and identify the small list of things that truly cannot move without you, that cognitive pressure lifts. You stop feeling chained to your phone and laptop, and you free up brain space to actually grow the business or just take a real lunch break.
How detailed does a coverage plan actually need to be?
It does not need to be elaborate. A simple checklist is enough. Think of it like an insurance policy. You are not handing off your entire role permanently, you are just making sure the people around you know what moves forward, what can wait, and who to call if something urgent comes up. Start with a Google Doc, list your recurring daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, note who could handle each one in your absence, and flag the true emergencies with a contact name attached. Simple and clear beats thorough and never finished.