Posts Tagged ‘Disaster’

The Dallas Morning News:

There’s a brush fire bearing down on your business. You have one hour to evacuate – which means you have one hour to execute a disaster preparation plan.

This is a scenario similar to what thousands of small business owners face each year. Luckily, that’s enough time to take care of a company’s most valuable assets – its employees and its data.

Disaster prep is one of those tasks that many small-business owners keep putting off.

While it’s understandable that some owners don’t get around to disaster planning, they’re courting danger.

“This is wrath-of-God stuff,” said John Toigo, a disaster recovery consultant based in Dunedin, Fla.

Minimal preparation – the kind you’d have to resort to if a disaster were in fact on the way – can be accomplished in an hour. And you can do much more if you have an entire day.

Toigo said the first thing to be done is to put together a list of contact phone numbers and physical and e-mail addresses for everyone on the staff, and to be sure everyone has a copy.

Luis Yepez, vice president of Mainstream Global, a Lawrence, Mass.-based computer reseller, said that it’s also important to know how you’re going to stay in touch with your clients, customers and vendors. They need to know your situation because what happens to you affects them.

Toigo noted that it’s easy to pop a flash drive into the USB ports of your computers and back up all your information, including customer and vendor lists, your firm’s books and inventory lists and the projects you’re working on. You can also e-mail data to a non-work address for safekeeping.

Photo by Timm Williams

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: pasotraspaso

There’s a 98% chance your idea will have gone nowhere, and you will still be working at your job and struggling to make ends meet. What’s the difference, then, between the 98% who fail and the 2% who succeed? One answer is that successful entrepreneurs avoid the traps that stop everyone else from succeeding.

Don’t let yourself jump at every single opportunity that comes your way. This will prove to be quite detrimental to your current idea and business. Stick with your original idea and business model. Yes, your business model and business plan may change here and there, but should always keep the original concept.

I’ve talked about the “bright shiny object syndrome” in the past before, and it applies here as well. You go from seminar to seminar to seminar before ever sitting down and implementing the information you took from the first seminar you attended. Before long you have piles of information and nothing to show for it but lost time at all those seminars. This is a form of the “bright shiny object syndrome”.

In the end always make sure you know right off the bat who you will be targeting towards. If you pitch your idea to someone and your all geeked up about it and their first question is “who do you think will use this product or service?” and you can’t answer them, you have to do some planning and re-thinking somewhere.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
photo credit: sashafatcat

We often talk about steps to take to ensure better progress and success in business, but I also think it is just as important to discuss the steps to avoid that do have the potential to cripple your business. Read on for crippling steps to avoid in your business that were discussed recently on MyVenturePad.

• Blowing off customer complaints. The idea of ignore it and it will eventually go away is not always the smart thing to do. With customers when ignored long enough will start to take action that could harm your company such as bad word of mouth advertising or even filing complaints with the BBB.
• Using outdated office equipment and technology. By using outdated systems this increases the time it takes to accomplish all of your projects and daily activities and could end up costing you money and causing loss of vital information.
• Not having some sort of system to protect you against fraud. Fraudulent behavior is becoming more and more prevalent today. With all of the systems out there to protect you against this behavior, it is rather dumb to not obtain one of them.

Data denial. It’s not enough to merely track metrics and gather financial information about how your business is performing. You have to look at and interpret the information and heed what it’s telling you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.