Topic: Creating a Plan B for Your Small Business
This week my trusty sewing machine began hiccuping. And then hissing. All in a very dramatic, threatening fashion. For a very long and distraught five minutes as I fiddled & unscrewed & jimmied & prayed & unplugged & unwound & hoped I thought of all possible worst case scenarios for this moment. Orders that would not be completed. Money to be frantically spent. Plans to be canceled.
It reminded me of a brief little fiasco I endured right during the rush of holiday orders last year. I took my machine in for a minor repair and the shop lost it. That's right. They lost it. They searched high & low & presented a variety of possible excuses. If not for my fussy toddler & quivering-just-about-to-lose-control lower lip I think I would've been up a creek. Noticing my despair & their obvious error they gave me a brand spankin' new machine right then & there..
But what if they hadn't?
That thought has haunted me this whole past year and has resurfaced as I begin preparing for this year's holiday rush. Along with my other bouts of bad luck; like our computer crashing. Twice. The baby sitter canceling. Again. I'm working on Plan B for the business.....
What will I do if ____________? {fill in the blank with any sort of crisis}
such as:
illness
computer crash
snow
injury
sick children
sick animals
machinery malfunction
etc....
Of course, we don't want to be a bunch of Nervous Nellys or Parnoid Pollys...but a Plan B is probably a good idea. And a Plan C or D is even smarter.
What types of plans & precautions are you thinking of taking in regards to your shop?
5 comments :
Ok, for the record, I have a gorgeous Pfaff. And a serger. And can walk to your house. Just in case!
I like Stephanie's plan B :D
For the most part, I try not to take on too much and allowing plenty of time to complete orders, as just-in-case occurs quite often over here!
Hello Stephanie! You're such a gem- thanks for letting me know I have a Plan B in you :)
Hope we can meet up soon...in fact, I'm off to send you an email now! xo
I swear not one day after I read this blog post, everything went wrong! I read this blog post and thought to myself...yep I think I have everything covered, I have 3 sewing machines, no backup needed. What else could go wrong? The next day, I had my computer on during the day (like everyday) and our power bleeped for just a minute and then came back on. Little did I know that the small event of losing power would make my hard drive break and die. So after many days of sobbing (over the lost 6 months of my son's photographs and 100's of product photos and events that I had not backed up onto anything and therefore was losing for good) my sweet husband brought the computer to a super genius who was able to eventually rescue all my lost information! But I still had a week of sobbing thinking it was lost for good. What is the moral to the story? Back up your computer every few weeks, unless you want to be me sobbing hysterically over the lost precious pictures. Ironically all of this happened during the week of my 30th birthday (which was horrible enough) and my husband told me at midnight (the day of my birthday) that he was able to save the pictures, which ended up being the best birthday present a girl could get!
I think I jinxed myself (and perhaps Marci too??) a week after posting this my sewing machine went on the fritz and my trusty old ancient back-up machine finally sewed it's last stitch. Many thanks to Stephanie, friend & sewer who kindly shared her lovely machine with me!
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