Diary of a Small Business Owner, Jackie Nees Virtual Assistant Edition: Working from Home, Extreme Challenge Edition

Missed Jackie's last blog?  Check it out HERE!

One of the joys of owning a home-based business is, well, I can work from home – or anywhere for that matter. But what happens when you’re forced to work somewhere else? I’ve had to more than once this week.

On Monday night we had a pretty big thunderstorm. It wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen by far, but when I woke up the next morning, myself and almost 80,000 other people were without power. The outage lasted for well over 8 hours. My small community seemed like a ghost town. I decided since I didn’t have lights much less internet access and neither did anyone else I would just forego work for that day and focus my attention on hoping the contents of my refrigerator didn’t go bad.

Tuesday was business as usual until Tuesday night when yet another storm hit. This time we had power but my internet was knocked out. Rather than waiting around hoping it would come back on I headed to my favorite coffee shop to work for the afternoon. I became a bit more frustrated when I returned home and found that it had still not been fixed. After a few calls to the cable company they informed us there was an area wide outage and they were working on it.

As I write this it’s still not fixed. It’s Thursday morning and I’m back at the coffee shop.
The point of all of this is that my business didn’t stop just because my wireless did. I had a backup plan. The day we had no power I texted my clients to let them know what was going on and that I would be off the grid for the day. The next day I was able to pack up my mobile office and head to a location where I could enjoy the atmosphere, a cup of coffee and get my work done.

Unfortunately not everyone has a pack-up-and-go business but there still needs to be a back-up plan in place should an unexpected wave of inconvenience hit. Are there alternate ways to reach your clients or customers? Do you take advantage of cloud computing technologies so you can access important information from another location in the event your computer crashes or the power goes out? Are there team members who can carry out tasks from their location until you are back up and running?  

This whole crazy week has lit a fire under me to really make sure I have some solid systems in place in case of emergency so that my business can continue to run without a hitch. In the meantime, I’m going to get back to my coffee and bagel and just maybe when I return my home office will be back up and running. Fingers crossed!