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Keep Your Small Business On Track

Running a small business is not all highs. When a business manager learns this they have overcome one of the hardest obstacles they ever will face.

Just today I talked to a Community manager. His webhost went down under the burden of his system. Yesterday he was in business, today he was completely out of business. It was as sudden as a restaurant having a fire in the kitchen. He contacted a problem solver/systems analyst in his network instantly.

They started the process of bringing the site online, but this man fumed and panicked the entire afternoon. He didn’t learn the truth behind the statement ‘if it was easy then everyone would do it.’

It is not easy to run a business. There are highs and there are lows. Every day can throw twists that need to be overcome. An advertising campaign may not produce the revenues needed. A new website may not be receiving the levels of targeted hits needed to produce the expected income. The shopping cart may be so difficult to use that consumers abandon the site.

The first response most business owners make is panicking and then reacting in fear. When people are afraid they do one thing – nothing. This is common in the business world. When a business starts to go under, the average business owner will adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude.

By the time the business owner does take action it will be too late. They will either be out of time or out of money. The business owner in the above example did the right thing. He reacted in fear, but instead of sitting back and waiting, or wasting time trying to solve the problem, he found someone with a level head to coach him through the problem.

Emergencies will always happen. The first step to problem solving is to create a plan of attack before something goes wrong. Never wait until a problem hits before creating an emergency plan. This plan should include an emergency fund incase the only way out of the problem is spending cash.

In the same way a family saves three months bill payments to carry them through a hard time, a business should hold money in reserve to carry them through hard times.

A word of warning – never borrow money to handle an emergency. Of course, it is unrealistic to believe that you will be able to avoid this problem. However, the warning should not be ignored. Almost 100% of all emergencies are caused by problems that do not generate income. Borrowing money for situations and items that do not generate income is one of the biggest small-business blunders.

The best way to keep a business on track is to avoid problems. There are millions of blog and forum comments and replies that discuss how they lost everything because of one minor problem. I personally know two ecommerce businesses that went under because the business owners did not back up both their server and their PC.

There is no reason to lose the data on a PC with services like Mozy.com that costs $4.50 a month. However, I know three freelancers who lost up to one month’s work because they never backed up their computer ‘off site’ daily. One had to pay a data forensic technician $1200 to save on month’s work from a corrupted hard drive.

Another had a top ranked website. This ecommerce business trusted the web host’s back up service. However, when the web host closed business, over night, without warning, then the business owner lost everything. This was not necessary. Anyone can learn how to put a back up copy of their website onto their computer. It is as easy as writing an email.

Both of these businesses went under because the business owner didn’t employ a strategy to avoid all possible emergencies.

There are some problems that are beyond the business owner’s capacity to control. In late 2007 YouTube.com went down for a few days. A training company with their ‘lectures’ on Youtube was stalled for the duration. They did have a back up plan. When the lectures went down, the ‘alt’ tags revealed where users could find PDF transcripts of the lectures.

About the Author

Mark Walters is a third generation entrepreneur and author. He offers free training and investing videos designed to speed you towards financial independence at
http://www.CashFlowInstitute.com

ED Stakeholders Forum: College- and Career-Ready Graduates (December 8, 2009)