I ran that call from a closet in a hospital

My daughter got admitted with an infection and we were locked in there for three days.

I ran my Tuesday call from a closet-sized office down the hall, which is not something I planned and not something anybody warned me about that morning.

The day before, I'd walked into the gym with a completely packed week already on the calendar, told my team I was gone for three days, and left.

Nothing dropped. Not ONE thing.

Some of you have known me long enough to know that was absolutely not always the case. There was a version of me who would have been answering texts from that hospital room, and would have told you he was being a good owner about it.

Here's what I want you to take from that, because it isn't a story about how great my team is.

Any gym on earth can survive a vacation you planned for. You spend two weeks setting it up, you write the notes, you cover the shifts, you tell everybody twice. Of course it holds. You built a temporary structure and then you stood inside it.

The real measure is the three days nobody planned for. The hospital. The funeral. The thing at two in the afternoon that you cannot say no to.

And you don't pass that test by being organized in the moment. You pass it because of work you did eighteen months earlier that felt unnecessary at the time.

That's the uncomfortable part. Everything that made those three days survivable was built back when I didn't need it, when handing something off was slower than doing it myself and there was no immediate reason to bother. Two years of giving away work before I was forced to.

There's no version where you build this in the week you need it. By then you're just hoping.

So the question isn't whether your team could handle you being gone next month with notice. Of course they could, you'd spend three weeks setting it up.

The question is what happens if you don't walk in tomorrow.

If you already know the answer and you don't like it, that's not a crisis. It's a project, and it's the one worth starting this week rather than the one you were going to start.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.