Hugh, The Maze MasterHugh's Reviews
Each week Hugh reviews something, anything really, that has provoked a thoughtful insight.Redundancy.
Just got a great lesson in pre-planning for emergencies. We had a lightning storm that took out our local Internet service provider's tower, our service, fused a wire, and blew out an ethernet switch.
That may sound like mumbo-jumbo, but basically, our Internet was down.
With our business, that means the credit card machines were down, our POS registers were down, my online CRM was down, even our phones were down because we have an IP-based phone system.
So for 6 hours(!), I ran around the farm tracing, testing, replacing, until we got service back.
Here's the lesson.
We weren't even busy and it was a disaster. I bet there are systems you can't live without too, so it's time to plan for redundancy.
Take two, they're small!
I now have ordered a second unit for every critical point in our IT infrastructure. EVERY POINT. Routers are $50, switches are $15, credit card machines are cheap to rent. (Email me if you want a CC processing vendor.)
I can swap out our entire network in less than 30 minutes now. How much money can you lose in 30 minutes in October?
Assess you vulnerabilities. Open one week early, just to make sure you know how everything is going to work. Turn all the power on, on EVERYTHING. Try to blow a breaker now, because you don't want to be without a 100AMP fuse with guests in the corn maze. (Had that happen too!)
In the end, your preparation is more about safety of your guests than making money. Without safety, you're sunk.
Think about redundancy in your critical systems this week and try to 'break' something.
That may sound like mumbo-jumbo, but basically, our Internet was down.
With our business, that means the credit card machines were down, our POS registers were down, my online CRM was down, even our phones were down because we have an IP-based phone system.
So for 6 hours(!), I ran around the farm tracing, testing, replacing, until we got service back.
Here's the lesson.
We weren't even busy and it was a disaster. I bet there are systems you can't live without too, so it's time to plan for redundancy.
Take two, they're small!
I now have ordered a second unit for every critical point in our IT infrastructure. EVERY POINT. Routers are $50, switches are $15, credit card machines are cheap to rent. (Email me if you want a CC processing vendor.)
I can swap out our entire network in less than 30 minutes now. How much money can you lose in 30 minutes in October?
Assess you vulnerabilities. Open one week early, just to make sure you know how everything is going to work. Turn all the power on, on EVERYTHING. Try to blow a breaker now, because you don't want to be without a 100AMP fuse with guests in the corn maze. (Had that happen too!)
In the end, your preparation is more about safety of your guests than making money. Without safety, you're sunk.
Think about redundancy in your critical systems this week and try to 'break' something.
Have fun,
Hugh
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