One of the biggest problems in doing business these days is having control over your own development, manufacturing or content control and getting things done right if something is wrong. For your consideration as an example, consider that my host, bluehost, who is generally excellent, was down around 12:30 AM on Monday morning May 25 2009. You may ask, who the heck is surfing that early in the morning and I would have to answer, it isn’t early in the morning for some places on the planet.
With the web host down, I am at the mercy of my provider for them to get up to speed, wake up a service technician (there voice mail said that they are closed for the holiday but there is 24 hour support) and there was NO 24 hour live chat support even though they said there was suppose to be.
What if I was being spidered by google when the server crashed or was down for maintenance? That would skew how others would find me in search engines as well.
What about something more basic like growing food? If for the next two months, due to bad weather we couldn’t get trucks to deliver food to the grocery stores, do we have the where-with-all and the fruit/vegetables/etc to grow and harvest?
I’ve talked about this before and I don’t think everybody thinks about planning for contingencies until they are too late. In the current economic Depression, it is a good idea to review all of one’s vendors and plans and ask yourself (and them) – what happens if you lose power?
What happens if the supply chain breaks down? Can you run your business without outside support?
If your answer to the above is “yes” for how long? Bluehost emailed me back within the hour to say they are working on fixing my problem, thanked me for making them aware of it and things should be okay in two hours. I get it. Accidents happen. Servers and routers die.
What was my contingecy plan if they couldn’t come back up? I would have to take whatever local backups for my website that I had and load them to another provider. I would have to change my domains. It almost makes me want to mirror my site with another provider.
Almost but not quite.
The purpose for this entry is to get you thinking about how interdependent we are on one another and life. What else can we do to become self sufficient? These are the practical questions that answers like solar power, home gardens, back systems and fresh water supplies make great answers for.
We, as a nation, also have become too dependent on outside goods and services and we need to recapture the lost art of being self sufficient, something that our forefathers encouraged when we had to answer to the King of England hundreds of years ago.
As we remember our fallen soldiers this Memorial Day here in America, remember that some of the soldiers died because there weren’t adequate preparations, or supply lines fell through. It is unimaginable but there have been incidents when battles have been lost simply because our troops ran out of ammunition or gasoline. That is why over the years the US military has developed and specialized in setting up extensive supply lines and if need be, back-up methods of getting food, ordinance and fresh troops to the battle lines.
On this Memorial Day as we remember our fallen soldiers, let us also remember to plan for keeping our selves functional and protected so that we aren’t reduced to a functional memory in terms of business or making money.
May 25 2009 Memorial Day
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Kim Isaac Greenblatt
The Lost Art of Self Sufficiency
Tags: Business
[...] and it boils down to that most people “get it”. When I first wrote about being self-sufficient, I expected a response but not the large one that I have been getting. Our society has worked [...]