A word to the wise as weird weather has an ever increasing bearing on life. Running a micro business leaves little scope for error or loss – don’t we all know it?
Losing time really hurts.
We are all superhuman and are never ill because we can’t afford to be. We are superhuman and will selflessly do all we can to keep things moving smoothly. But sometimes….
Imagine my delirium when, here in the mountains of Catalonia, a thunderous storm uprooted a poplar tree on a neighbour’s land and it toppled onto our power and phone lines.
Fizz bang, wallop. Now you know why I haven’t posted for a while.
The drama stopped four small businesses in their tracks ….for days. The accident resulted in a power surge that burned out every electrical motor that was plugged in.
Beyond having no electricity we lost our well pump, house and office water pumps, the telephone, modem, washing machine, CD player, etc, and the end of the world seemed nigh as light bulbs pulsed and then popped. But at least we didn’t lose our computers due to a fairly sophisticated surge protector.
Our wine-making neighbour lost everything including computers and temperature controllers in his wine cellar. Gulp.
But the greatest loss was time: Trawling about with sceptical insurance assessors, having to traipse off to a friend’s office to get online, trying to source new equipment and, to top it all, providing an extra pair of hands for the electrician who, understandably, couldn’t heave the pump out of our 20ft well on his own. Tick tock.
Our mistake was not to have a surge protection for all essential hardware elements of our business.
Yes, we had insurance cover and, yes, we keep our data safe and sound in the WinWeb cloud.
But the lesson is there. We are now exploring the cost of a gadget that will protect everything.
Survival demands that we sail close as to the wind as possible whatever the weather. We, and maybe you, have no choice. Small business owners are all potential Olympic sailing gold medallists. But taking a minute or sixty to consider all possible contingencies is time well spent given the increasingly alarming vagaries of things not even superhumans can control.
Now where did I put that solar energy catalogue?
