Infrastructure is one of those things you don’t necessarily think about as a new business owner.
Thing is, strong infrastructure often turns out to be the competitive edge that no one (other than you) notices.
Your clientele notices “stuff”:
- You’re always on top of things and that you rarely, if ever, have to say “oh, that fell in a crack.”
- Your staff knows where orders, parts and service people are, when they’ll be show up and what, if anything, is holding them up.
- Your staff is proactive more often than not.
- You don’t lose checks, invoices, legal forms and other marginally important paperwork (yes, that was sarcasm).
- Their priorities never seem to get lost in yours.
- You rarely (if ever) miss a deadline – particularly one that would embarrass or damage their business.
In other words, they notice when you really have your act together. Not only do they notice, but they remember, tell others and keep coming back.
The price of worry
Infrastructure is what helps you keep from worrying about “stuff” every single day.
Every moment you spend fretting about “stuff”, chasing down minutiae, emailing to ask for status reports is time focused on things that you shouldn’t even have to think about.
When you have infrastructure in place that takes these things off your mind, your mind is free to do more important thinking. More valuable thinking about things (and on a level) that transforms what you do.
Something as simple as an automated website backup process that sends your content to an offsite backup location is one less menial task and one less brain-sucking thing to keep in the back of your mind.
Do-It-Yourself?
Entrepreneurs are often DIY kinds of folks because we want something slightly better than the norm. It’s why we build solutions.
It also means we spend time on things we have no business doing. Either we aren’t any good at it, or we don’t have time to get (much less stay) current in that activity. It might be computers, your network, plumbing, human resources, benefits or event management.
Frequently these things involve some combination of legal, insurance, finance and taxes. Not the kind of “stuff” you want to mess up.
Little things that can destroy a day…or a week
If I lose electricity, I lose water because our well requires a pump. Meanwhile, my computers will be up for another hour or so thanks to uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), giving me time to backup, shutdown my systems cleanly and leave if I need to keep working.
Few people backup enough, for example. If lightning from one of the thunderstorms that visit your coastline almost every day destroys your computer, you get to buy a new computer and waste a day setting it up. If your customer and order data isn’t backed up, you’ll spend even more time re-entering your customer/order data – if you have it on paper somewhere. So much for those orders you needed to ship tomorrow.
I do all my client work in VMs (VM = virtual machine). I backup the VMs I use to a portable external drive. I backup to it regularly and test it often to make sure it works. Regularly does not mean annually – it means weekly, worst case. The work I do for clients is backed up constantly.
This means I can run out the door with nothing but that external drive, go to a local store, buy a computer, download VMWare and be working again without losing a thing, inside an hour – anywhere. Allowing the failure of a $500 desktop computer to kill your business is just foolish.
Your business might not be as portable as mine, and that’s ok. The takeaway, no matter what you do, is “Protect your ability to continue to do business productively”.
The back of your mind is full
The back of your mind is full enough already. Let it focus on serious work that only you can do and let experts take care of the important stuff outside of your expertise. The same goes for your staff. That back of the mind stuff is what infrastructure does so well.
Think long-term and strategically about infrastructure investments – and then invest as soon as you can.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected].