The day the roof of my business collapsed

Nearly 12 years ago, new born in hand, stopped at my wife’s salon we owned.  The stylists had called, “the roof is leaking.”

Being the middle of winter, I knew it was likely a frozen pipe leaking.

“Finish your clients and get out.”

They called again 30 minutes later and the entire roof had collapsed.  A pipe froze, cracked, and dripped. For what must have been days, it slowly leaked across the whole roof until the weight was too much.

Learned a lot. Maybe nothing new, but confirmed the importance of some things I had in place.

• The downtime was just a blip. We moved the salon’s equipment to the suite next door and business resumed.
• The client records and point of sale systems were backed up. Those backups had backups.

We sold the salon a few years later, and it lives on to this day with the new owner.  The lessons learned/confirmed also live on.

• All of our company’s servers at SEO National are backed up locally at their data center.
• Those backups are redundantly backed up to offsite locations.
• Personally, I keep all my files backed up to an external hard drive, backed up to Dropbox, and both of those backed up to Backblaze.
• My house could burn down, lose my computer and hard drives, and I’d be back in business the next day.

One moment could put you out of business. Literally, one thing in one moment.

But this confirmed the value of thinking ahead and betting on your self with being proactive.