TUESDAY CHALLENGE: BE PREPARED

Sometimes a non-business issue awakens a business issue that should be addressed.

For Mother’s Day my daughter and her family along with my wife and I, decided that a picnic by a lake that we used to visit when our kids were young would be a great way to celebrate. The lake was only an hour and a half away, and the freeway should make it a pleasant and easy trip.

We left mid-morning and arrived around noon, enjoyed a great picnic lunch, and then proceeded to walk around the lake, a distance of approximately two and a half miles. We left the area around 5:30 pm, and after several miles on the freeway, we came to a complete stop. It appears that an accident closed the freeway about 5 miles from where we stopped. We, along with thousands of other travelers, found ourselves in a “no move situation” with no exit until the accident was cleared up.

Now comes the lesson. The traffic did not start moving until after 10:30 pm. We, along with most of the other families in the five mile back-up, were traveling without adequate water and food. We spent part of our time creating a list of things that we would always keep in our vehicle. Emergencies can happen anytime, anywhere.

As usual, my thoughts turned to business, and I started a mental list of what things could cause my business to come to a complete stand still. Included in my list were such items as:

• What if I got hurt or died in an accident?
• What if I had an out of town family emergency that required my leaving immediately?
• What if I lost all my clients at once? ( Yes, I had a client whose employees had worked for a year, preparing to open their own firm and steal all the clients)
• What if someone broke into my office and stole all our computers?

My list got a lot bigger as I realized that perhaps I wasn’t totally prepared for an emergency.

Your challenge this week is to create a list of unexpected emergencies that could arise in your business. The rest of the challenge is for you to offer a solution and implement it for each item on your list.

In other words, be prepared for business emergencies. This is not meant to scare you, but to help you be prepared so that you can concentrate on growing your business.

Stay ready so you won’t have to get ready.