Be Prepared

Issue 008 - 2019-03-11

Lesson: Prepare for the worst, then stop worrying

As our silver anniversary party was drawing to a close two Sundays ago, the power turned off in our whole area. Most of our guests had already left, so we also called it a day. I had an important phone call scheduled for the next afternoon, but that was 24 hours away.

Blackouts happen often on Crete. We used to get them in protest to privatisation plans. That was the past. Now they sometimes schedule maintenance for Sunday mornings. They do warn us with papers stuck on the electricity poles, but I tend to ignore these.

2009 was a bad year for me. I travelled over 150 days. In January of 2010, I saw a professional Polycom video conferencing system. My training partners Exit Certified were using it to deliver remote courses. I saw it in action, and immediately made plans to set one up at my house. We built a new office, conference room and installed a fast internet connection.

The question I had to ask though - what happens if the power goes out during a course?

At the time, Exit was selling my courses for $3500 per student. So say we have 10 students and we have a blackout and cannot deliver the course, what will that cost us?

One of the builders was an engineer who liked to tinker. He looked around and found a local company building generators. The price for the four cylinder diesel engine was about the same as two students. I bought it.

Back to our party. When we arrived back home, we heard the deep hum of our beast turning diesel into kilowatts. All night long it ran, keeping our house warm and freezers cold. In the morning, Maxi and I carried an elderly couple through a raging river. When we got home, we could enjoy a warm shower, thanks to our lovely machine. But those are all comforts and conveniences.

The part that mattered to our business was that I could talk to my client in the afternoon. The rest of our village was dark, all the way down to Kalathas. The blackout lasted for 30 hours. In other parts of Crete, it took over a week to get power back.

It pays to prepare for as many unexpected disasters as we can. What happens if your laptop is stolen? If your hard drive crashes? If your bank goes into liquidation? If your passwords are leaked? If you die?

Ironically we had to once postpone a remote course by a day because of a power failure. But the electricity went out in Canada, not in Crete. Their building did have a backup generator, but no diesel. Blackouts are so rare there, they were not ready when it happened. They had become complacent.

Think about what could disrupt your business. Then have contingency plans of what to do in those cases. Most of these will not happen. But some may. And when they do, it pays to be ready. And when you are, then you can stop worrying about what may or may not happen. You can be like the "Wife of Noble Character" in Proverbs 31:10-31 (yeah, she was living entrepreneurially)

Kind regards from Unterhaching München

Heinz

Living Entrepreneurially Archive

• 012 - Crashproof Your Business
• 011 - "Was weg ist, ist weg"
• 010 - Fear of Rejection
• 009 - Quality, Reliability, Be Nice
• 008 - Be Prepared
• 007 - Riding School
• 006 - Inner Dynamo
• 005 - The Fuel Light is ON
• 004 - "I filled it in exactly as your father did"
• 003 - The Espresso Machine Guy
• 002 - "Escape is Giving Me Bad Dreams"
• 001 - The Cleaning Fluid Injection Device

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