If you find it hard to sleep because you’re dreaming up nightmares about your business failing, then don’t worry—you aren’t alone. It’s normal for a business owner to be anxious about each day, and perhaps the hardest part of running a small business is the anxiety you get from making decisions that you aren’t entirely comfortable with. However, being uncomfortable is good. It’s a sign that you are treading on territory that you aren’t used to. As long as you plan to conquer those uncomfortable situations, you will grow as a business and also as an entrepreneur.
But how can you stop these nightmares? It’s easy. Here is a couple of ways to help you prevent your business nightmares from becoming a reality.
Know Helpful People
It could be a lawyer to prevent you getting sued by angry customers, it could be your cousin who’s a fantastic freelance designer, or it could be a company that does last-minute deliveries for your business. Whatever your business, there is bound to be some people that are extremely helpful to you and you could benefit from giving them a reason to stick with you.
For instance, if you’re caught short and you realised that all of your transportation vehicles are low on fuel, or that your machines don’t have enough lubricant to run smoothly at your factory, then a business like New Era Fuels could be your saving grace. Companies like New Era office fast delivery of fuels and lubricants so that you don’t have to order lubricants online or tow your vehicles to the nearby petrol station to get them running.
A Continuity Plan
Let’s say you run an outsourcing business with thousands of clients and hundreds of freelancers working under your name. Now let’s say a storm passes by and destroys one of your hard drives because your surge protector failed, and now you’re left with a hard drive that’s burnt to a crisp on the inside. Unfortunately for you, that hard drive held all of your customer information and order information for the next month. You had no backup and now all of your information is quite literally toast.
You might be able to file an insurance claim and get some of your equipment back, but the reality is that you’re going to be a dead business within a few days because you just lost all of your customer information and you can’t make a profit. You can’t hope to build it back if you had thousands of clients, and your name is going to be forever tarnished. So how do you prevent this from happening?
Have a continuity plan. Have remote backups for your information, upload your data to a secure server every few hours, and ensure you have a way to restore data that could be lost due to freak accidents. If you aren’t planning for the day your business explodes or your employees leave you for a competitor, then you aren’t going to make it far as a business. Have several backup plans and make sure you’re thinking five steps ahead of everyone else.
