We live on the Texas coast, and we all know the answer to that question, “In a heartbeat.” But just as we prepare for hurricanes for our family, home, and pets, we prepare for our business to be safe during a hurricane. The Texas Department of Public Safety has a free downloadable book about hurricane preparedness for business at this URL: http://www.harriscountycitizencorps.com/newsletters/hurricaneplanforbusinesses.pdf
June 1 marked the beginning of hurricane season, 2011. It’s important for small businesses to learn from their big brothers and sisters – the time for recovery is before the disaster. Remember that a study by the American Red Cross said that a whopping 40 percent of small businesses never reopen after a disaster. Another study found that 93 percent of small business close within a year of a disaster resulting in a data loss.
Here are ten tips for protecting your network and data and getting your business back up and running after a hurricane.
1. Identify key computers and servers and protect these computers vigorously. That means making sure you have cloud backup services or at least off-site backup of your data and server image so that even if your office is inaccessible for a week, you can operate from home.
2. Access your vulnerability. Let’s face it, in Houston, we’re all vulnerable, but how vulnerable are you? Is your business a store-front with a plate glass window, or are you in a brick office building with most of your offices inside, away from windows? Are you in an area that will flood, or a high area? Is yours a frame building or a brick building? How close are you or key employees from the office?
3. Review your insurance policy. What is covered and for how much?
4. Create a written disaster plan for your business:
5. Develop a plan for the day before and the day after the hurricane – who does what when; when do you let people leave to take care of their families; what is the get well plan for afterward?
6. Make sure you have a landline connection in a protected area of the office, and put a landline phone in your hurricane kit.
7. Create a hurricane kit:
8. Consider buying a generator large enough to run your computers and a few fans.
9. What is your relocation plan? If your building is damaged, flooded, burnt, where will you relocate and how fast do you need to be operational?
10. Develop a communication plan for you and your employees and key customers. This plan should include email, telephone, and texting options so that if one system fails, another may work. Make a list of home telephone numbers of your employees and customers so that you can stay in communication even when the office is closed and out of commission. A simple email explaining where you are working from, what you can and can’t do, and how soon you will recover will work wonders with your customers.
If you need additional information on protecting your computers, network, or data, contact me at Harold@WeissTechSolutions.com.
Don''t lose your business to a hurricane!
It was 6 a.m. and I was barely awake, but the trash service comes to our house by 8 a.m., so there I was, bleary-eyed and rolling trash cans to the street, when I heard a tiny meowing. Someone had stuffed five little kittens into a small and dirty cat carrier and left it at the side of the street. I live near the corner in a “country” subdivision, so the street is narrow and the kittens had rolled into the ditch. They had been there a while, were sitting in a puddle of urine, all mashed into this one small space.
This could have been a disaster, but my wife and I were prepared. We’ve lived here for 13 years, and this isn’t the first batch of skinny, abandoned kittens we’ve picked up near the house. We volunteer for two local cat rescues so we have the resources to try to get these kittens adopted. Many folks would have wrung their hands, let them out to “fend for themselves” in our coyote-ridden fields, or taken them to a shelter where, during the summer, local shelters are euthanizing 300-500 cats and kittens a day per shelter.
We pulled out two old cages, washed, disinfected, and set them up in our barn. We filled bowls with dry and canned food and water for them, gave them a mat, a small litter box, and a few brand-new toys out of the cupboard with a box for them to hide in and play. We applied flea treatment, clipped their nails, weighed them, and gave them the first dose of dewormer. Within a few hours, their heads were spinning!
How do these kittens pertain to your business?
There are two types of small businesses: those who have experienced a disaster and those who have yet to experience a disaster. And by disaster, I mean something like the following, all of which have happened to clients of mine:
• Hurricane – power down for two weeks, unable to get to the office
• Thief stole copper from AC units at the building – no air conditioning for two days
• Power lines down – no power for three days
• Laptop stolen
• Web-surfing employee’s children download a virus and employee unknowingly distributes it
• Staffer opens the computer and fries the system board and/or hard drive in an attempt to repair
• Malicious employee deletes data from shared server drives
And my personal favorite – nervous employee at a customer site leaves laptop case next to the restroom sink while busy, laptop case falls into sink, setting off motion-detector faucet, soaking case and laptop and hard copies of company brochures. Meeting in five minutes.
What’s your Plan B for these disasters?
If your company depends on your technology, you need to consider what you would do when your disaster strikes. You need an answer to the following questions:
• Do you have an automatic, frequent, protected backup process in place?
• Are you backing up, at least periodically, either offsite or to an external hard drive?
• If you have a server which runs network applications such as email, shared documents, do you have an automatic backup for your server image?
• Can you download your backup of data or server image and be functional in adequate time for your business?
• Do you know what data is essential for you to back up?
• If you or your employees work from home computers, what are you doing to ensure that data is backed up?
You should know how long a time frame you have to get up and running. I have a client who is a one-person shipping office. She works from the back room of her home. She didn’t think she’d need to worry about disaster recovery because she’s so small. Then her hard drive died, and she was unable to access her specialized shipment tracking software or her database of tracking numbers. That’s when she came to me. Her clients ship all over the world, and she can’t afford to wait a week to be running again.
I have another client that produces high-end technical documentation for unannounced products. When that product hits the shelves, the documentation must be in the box. Writers sometimes work through the night to finish by deadline. They can’t have ANY downtime. If a server goes down, they need to be back up within 48 hours, but when an individual’s production unit goes down, that writer needs to be back up within the hour.
What’s your timeframe for having your business back up and running?
It’s a lot easier to make a plan now, before the disaster hits, rather than when you’re staring at a soaking wet laptop in your customer’s restroom or you walk into a hot office building and your server is gasping for air. Do you need help deciding how often to back up, where to back up to, what software to use, what data to back up, and how to recover from a disaster? Call us at 832-303-1349 for a free backup and disaster recovery audit, or fill out the contact form from our website, http://WeissTechSolutions.com. We’ll give you our no-obligation recommendations.
And those kittens?
They’re up for adoption through http://HappyCatAdoptions.org. Our veterinarian, Dr. Angel from Angel’s Pet Hospital on Kuykendahl in Tomball has pronounced them healthy, given them their first kitten vaccines, and scheduled their spay/neuter surgeries the first week of July. Would you like to see photos or video? Go to the website and click the “kittens” link at the top of the page, view any of these kids:
• Huckleberry
• Tiffany Tippytoes
• Cairo
• Flamingo Freddy
• Arizona Ted
And watch the cute kitten video: http://www.youtube.com/user/HappyCatAdoptions?blend=3&ob=5#p/u/0/We-NJHdSYMg
I read a variety of blogs on technology and business to stay current on what’s coming around the corner and to sharpen my skills as a business owner. Some of them pertain directly to my industry and are easy to relate to my situation. A few of them are from other industries but I like to look at every article and interaction I have with the filter of “What gold nugget of information can I mine from this experience?”.
Recently there was an article that I would suggest any business owner to read called “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do”
Here are ten rules (plus a bonus quote) that I was able to extract and apply to my own business:
15. Never say “I don’t know” to any question without following with, “I’ll find out.”
Technology is such a broad industry. I can’t be an expert in all aspects of every technology but I do know where to find information and experts on any single piece of technology. One of my skills is the ability to learn technology quickly. I may not know everything, but I know where I can find out. This is also a key answer that I look for when interviewing employees. I’ll ask very hard technical questions that I want to stump them. I’m not looking for an answer, I’m looking for their reaction when they don’t know the answer.
18. Know before approaching a table who has ordered what. Do not ask, “Who’s having the shrimp?”
Know your customers. Take notes about their business, needs, goals, vendors, everything. Write it down and store it in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. When I’m going out for a quarterly review with my customer, I need to know where they are going and where they have been.
23. If someone likes a wine, steam the label off the bottle and give it to the guest with the bill. It has the year, the vintner, the importer, etc.
Documentation is important. So many technicians are hot gunslingers when it comes to solving a problem but they can’t sit still long enough to document what happened and how did you fix it. My customers need to have a binder with all their network documentation, passwords, vendor information, and network topology diagram in case their primary technician gets hit by a bus.
56. Do not ignore a table because it is not your table. Stop, look, listen, lend a hand. (Whether tips are pooled or not.)
Teamwork is important. Taking care of the customer is the primary goal, internal politics are handled behind the scenes.
58. Do not bring judgment with the ketchup. Or mustard. Or hot sauce. Or whatever condiment is requested.
Our job is to create technology solutions that fit for each individual customer. That could be Cloud, On-premise, Linux, Windows, Commercial, or Open-source. Don’t force to the customer to use a technology that I want to use. Support the technology that best fits every unique customer.
62. Do not fill the water glass every two minutes, or after each sip. You’ll make people nervous.
62(a). Do not let a glass sit empty for too long.
Communication needs to happen frequently enough to keep our customers in the loop regarding issues, tickets, updates but not so often that it’s viewed as “spam from the computer guy!”
63. Never blame the chef or the busboy or the hostess or the weather for anything that goes wrong. Just make it right.
Don’t point fingers. Assigning blame doesn’t fix the problem. Fix the problem first, then figure out what you can learn from the mistake.
87. Do not stop your excellent service after the check is presented or paid.
Follow up with the customer after service is complete. Did the problem stay resolved or reoccur a week later? Close the loop asking for feedback.
89. Never patronize a guest who has a complaint or suggestion; listen, take it seriously, address it.
The majority of customers who have a bad experience with your product or service will not say anything, never repeat business with you, and you will never know why you lost that customer. Any customer who is willing to step forward and communicate a problem with you is extremely important you should give them your undivided attention.
99. Do not show frustration. Your only mission is to serve. Be patient. It is not easy.
In my business, every time I pick up the phone is because a customer is having a problem, they are frustrated, angry, and need help. They don’t call to tell me that everything is running fine. If I’m frustrated and angry about the problem as well, it just creates bad mojo on both sides of the phone. I’m the sponge to soak up frustration and clean up the problem leaving us both feeling better.
And the bonus quote from Bill Gates: ““Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
I’ve always said that pissed off business owners are my best customers. If your customer is unhappy and they’re willing to tell you about it, it means they are passionate about their situation and they care enough about the relationship with your business to give you the opportunity to make a change and fix it. Appreciate every one of these opportunities.
I was able to pull 10% of those rules and apply them to my business. How about you? Comment below with one rule from the article that you can apply to your business.
Harold
I recently got a call letting me know that I had won a FREE lunch at a local restaurant where I had dropped my business card in a fishbowl. The gentleman who called me asked me to pick from six appointments in the week. He said that he does lunches three days a week with two lunches per day. I was a bit confused at first but caught on quickly that he was a local business that sponsors the lunch for an opportunity to network with other professionals in the area.
I met him the next week and we had an interesting discussion on insurance, politics, and marketing. It wasn’t a hard sell, he explained what services he provides and I talked about what my business does. In the end, he actually brought me his laptop to fix. I loved the marketing idea and asked him a bit more about the details.
He said that he does about five to six lunches per week and the goal is to just make the human connection with another professional. His business is a relationship business, it’s not a product on a shelf. He needs to understand the motivations, plans, and dreams of his customer to create a solution that is custom fit for them.
I was excited to hear about it since my business is very similar. I don’t just provide “computer repair”, my goal is to be a business partner or virtual CIO to my clients and enable them to use technology in ways they are not even aware of to make their business more profitable or capture operational efficiencies.
He said that occasionally you’ll get people who will take advantage of the free lunch or turn out to be people who you don’t really want a business relationship with due to their personalities but in the long run you meet a number of interesting, honest people and create opportunities to serve them.
It’s a simple low cost method to reach out to local business owners. Just get a local eatery to agree to put out your fishbowl at the register and you pay for the lunches. The eatery gets continued business and you get new prospects.
When trying out any new marketing venture, you need to have a clear picture of what your goal is. Depending on your business, you will likely not be able to qualify a prospect, make a presentation about your products and services, and close a deal in a loud crowded restaurant over lunch. Your goal for a lunch should be simple, make a connection with the person and see if they could be a potential customer. Ask about them and their business to qualify them. People are usually willing to talk about themselves and appreciate people who truly listen to them. You already have their contact info from the business card. At this point you are turning a cold prospect into a warm prospect for future marketing.
Good luck in your marketing!
Epsilon was recently hacked and your data may be at risk. Please review this video blog for information on what to do.
