Managing Small Business IT Infrastructure

The Small Business Show Episode 350 for Wednesday, October 20, 2021. Greetings folks and welcome to the small Business show here at BusinessShow Co where you know, we are small businessing every week, really every day. But you know, we come do the show every week. Sponsors for this episode include a new sponsor, shopify.com SBS so a new sponsor but probably not a new name for you folks out there. And Bambi B a m b e.com small where you can get your free HR audit and@shopify.com SBS where you get a 14 day trial. We'll talk about the details of all of that shortly here. For now, Small Businessing here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean. Small Businessing in Lafayette. I love both those sponsors. If you've ever had to create E commerce store from scratch, you realize what a nightmare it can be and how much money you can blow through trying to tweak everything.

And then I've done this.

That's why I'm like, oh, you know these guys, I wish they existed, you know, 20 years ago. And then the Bambi thing, you know, again trying to manage your HR department. So those are super useful. So I'm actually, I'm looking forward to hearing those, those ads when they come up later in the show.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we're going to talk about it support and figuring that kind of stuff out today a little later in the show. Stick around for. And we have some other topics that I'm excited to talk about too.

Absolutely, absolutely. What's, what's your, what's your opening topic? I, I'm eager to hear this.

So this I want to talk about something happened to me. It's been about a month and I've, I've calmed down enough to where I'm not going to get into a crazy rant. Well, I say that now, but no guarantees. Yeah. Something happened to me that really hit me from a business standpoint far more deeper than I ever thought it would. And I want to say, I want to explain it and then I want to talk about some of the things I've spoken about on the show and how I use some of those tactics to get to get through this.

Okay.

And this is revolves around one of my businesses does a significant amount of business on ebay and I have a very close relationship with the folks. A lot of people at ebay executives met with CEOs, I've spoken to their executives. I've been in the ebay commercial. Commercial, you Know, I, I speak at all these events and, you know, so, yeah, tight with them and. Because I really believe in the concept that there's no better. If you're a product salesperson, you can even sell services on there. But especially if you're a product person, buying, selling, manufacturing, whatever you are, there's just no way to better a b test things than in a real world marketplace like ebay. And you can find out super quick. And the, the data that they give you access to make those decisions is just unbelievable. The wealth of data. So, so that, that's aside. So back in about a month ago, everything's fine. I'm kicking along and I get an email. I go log into my account every day like I do for this one business, and things are like, looks a little different. And I get a message that says, we have restricted your account.

Swung the ban hammer, didn't they?

Yeah, I couldn't believe it. Yeah. And the first person, one of my.

Businesses has an app on the Google Play Store and we, we suffer the same thing. It's like, you never know.

Yes.

When that's gonna happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I immediately thought completely wrong about this because I was in my head, I'm like, do you know who I am? Which is the worst thing.

Oh, yeah. No, don't play that card. Yeah, no, you can't.

But I, I mean, I'm like, wait.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I have volunteered so much time to helping you, and I have and all these kind of things. I'm like, well, okay, so I gotta, I gotta dig in. What happened? This must be a. There's gotta be something wrong here. So I, I dig in a little more and, and I, I make a phone call and I have my account or this account. We do significant volume, and so we belong to this, what they call concierge. Customer service. Sure. Which means you'll get a customer service person within two minutes or they'll call you back within two minutes. Right.

Okay.

Which is great. Which is great. It's like you talked, it's like you talked about last week getting, getting connected to customer service faster because you're a higher.

Yeah. You got more. You got status. That's right. Yeah. It doesn't matter where you are.

I call and this kind of thing. And usually they're just great, but this time they just couldn't tell me anything. And they just said, well, because, you know, the first sentence in this message I get says, we placed a temporary restriction on your account because we noticed activity that we believe is a risk to our community. And boy, that and boy, that just really pissed me off, you know, and, and so I said, tell me what, what is the risk? And they couldn't tell me.

Oh, did they? Not now, from your estimation, from your interpretation, did the person you were speaking with know and was not allowed to tell you or was the information was not available to them either?

I think it's the latter. I think the information was not available. Super nice person.

Sure.

Really tried to help because they're usually just terrific.

Yeah, they put those customer service ninjas on those programs. They're all right. Yeah, they're awesome.

They're great.

Yeah.

And they couldn't tell me. And then I said, well, okay, I need to know what's going on here. And so, I mean, everything was shut down. I, you know, they wouldn't pay us anything. We couldn't change our. We could sell the existing listings we had, but we wouldn't be paid.

What?

Yeah, we couldn't change anything, any listings. Couldn't edit, couldn't do anything like that.

It almost sounds like you were, you were flagged for like money laundering activity or like something you think the worst. Right.

Because you don't know.

Because you don't. Well, and that kind of restriction is the sort of thing where they are worried about their ability to continue to conduct business if they permit you to continue to conduct business. Right. Like that's, that's generally how those, you know, do not pass go. We have restricted you. You know, guilty until proven innocent is generally because the platform thinks that you are caught truly causing them their business harm. Now, whether they're correct or not, of course, remains to be seen.

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing that really frustrated me is so I'm looking, going, okay, what do I need to do? You know, all I need is some instruction here. I can get this figured out. Tell me what it is to resolve these things. You need to resolve any outstanding issues with buyers through ebay resolution center. It's like, wow, what have I not done? I looked at ebay resolution center. There's not a single case open, of course, because we resolve things quickly and I use this two tokens customer service method and things go away and everybody's happy. And then it says more specific details are provided below. Well, that's blank. And it says, once you complete these requirements, reply to the email and we'll review your account. That was it. And yeah, that's exactly right. I've caused myself. I forced myself. Take a deep breath and yeah, I got this late in the day. And so I said, okay, I need to sit and, you know, kind of let this go over so I don't go off on somebody.

Yeah, because.

Because they don't know this department, whatever. They don't know I'm involved with this and that. I mean, we've had the ebay head of community on the. On our show.

Show, yeah. Right here. Yeah, absolutely.

And so took me, you know, I made some calls the next morning. Still couldn't get through. And then. So where I'm going with this, if you are doing business on platforms or marketplaces, so if you're. It doesn't matter if you're on ebay or Poshmark or these other places for selling products, if you're up on, you know, StockX or goat, or if you're using Facebook for ads and Instagram, all this kind of stuff, it is critically important that you build a network of people to help when you. So when you need help, a network of people that are involved with those companies. So when you need help, you can get it quickly and get somebody to stand in and stand up and champion your. Your cause or whatever it is. So I immediately reached out to Rebecca Michaels, who happened to be on our show, of course, and, you know, and I knew her before she was on the show, and I, you know, she handles these calls that I'm involved in and employee training and stuff. And I just said, rebecca, you know, we have this going on. She responded quickly. Thank you for letting me know about this. I'm. I'm on it. We'll get it. I didn't hear anything for, like, 20, you know, 24 hours.

Freaking out, you know, a rough 24 hours right there, folks. Yep.

Bury. They bury your listings. You're not in search results. So basically, that account, it's just shut down.

It doesn't exist unless somebody knows where to find it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. And then so. So I went back up, jumped back up on LinkedIn. Like, who else do I know, you know, that I can go, oh, you know, I found another person, other executive at ebay that I'm connected with, that I have spoken with before, sat on a panel before, and I'm like, great, I'll reach out to him. And he was aware of it too. He said, oh, yeah, Rebecca CC'd me on this. We're gonna get it taken care of. It took about three days.

Whoa, that's a long time. But.

It's a long time.

But it. But totally normal for things like this. They will ban you in a matter of a Minute, but unraveling it, especially if it's an error, but even if it's not, even if it's something that you need to correct or something like it, that process is slow. Yeah, it is slow.

And it turns out we just got flagged by the algorithm.

Oh, no kidding.

Our volume increased a certain amount. We went over some certain threshold. We had no complaints. We have 100% feedback, we have no cases. And they wanted the, the next email. Finally when I said, hey, it says here you're going to give me details. But I never got them. That's one of the things it took another day to get and they wanted just a mountain of documentation. I said, I can give you any piece of pa. Any documentation you want, you know, because I, I fully documented here, we're not, I sell high end brands that are often counterfeited and it could be related to that. I asked them that and they couldn't give me. I, I still don't know whether it was, you know.

Yeah, you never got a straight answer.

Never. I, was it a brand that got, you know, did somebody from Chanel or Gucci or, you know, Louis Vuitton call you? You know, I don't know. They never, I never heard that. But the, the, the takeaway here is as your business starts to, if your business starts to become reliant on one or more platforms or marketplaces, spend some time up on LinkedIn connecting with the people that manage those marketplaces. If you're in the Facebook marketplace and in their set, you know, selling or you're just your ads, make sure you connect with people that are involved in those areas and do it, do it.

Before you need them, before you need them.

You know, just send a message, hey, thanks, we're using Facebook ads. We're really happy. Da da da da. If, you know, if you want some feedback, I'd be glad to give it to you. Anytime you'll typically get connected with that person, maybe they go, hey, thanks for reaching out. Well, that person then can help you in the future. If you have a problem, at least provide you or maybe even just get you to the next person that can help you. So you don't want to rely just on the customer service because I think this would have taken me a week or more or more to get taken care of. Would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars. So that's the moral to my story.

And yep, it's it. Very few businesses, even if you think you are independent, very few businesses are fully immune to this, you know, unless even Google Ads, whatever.

Like you said, the Play Store.

Yeah, well, but even just, just Google listings, if they think you've done something to. I mean, everybody should be doing something with regards to tuning their sites for SEO, right? I mean, that's the thing. If you happen to do something, even unintentionally, that looks to Google's spiders like you're trying to trick them, which is what SEO is at some level. Right. I mean, it's not that you're trying to trick them, but you're trying to give them exactly what they're looking for so that they will show people when they are looking for the things that you have. Right. And so, like, if you do one thing that crosses that line, you can be, you know, devalued in search. And it could take. I've seen it take six months for that to be remedied because it's automated when it happens. And. And then you, you know, you file a request for a review. And especially if that first review doesn't go your way, like if you think you fixed everything and then you, you know, and then it turns out, no, you haven't. Now, the second review, they make you wait twice as long as. Right. Yeah, it's rough.

Yeah. If. If search is critically important to your business and to all of us, but especially if. If you're relying on, you know, Google search come up, you know, reaching out and getting involved with Google and the meeting people there. Smart.

Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah.

Good way to spend your time.

So it is a good way to spend your time.

To my rant. And, you know, I'd love to hear people. If you've had situations like that come up and how you creatively solve them, let us know feedbackusinessshow.com Absolutely.

Yeah, man. Gosh, no, that's not. I mean, yeah, you had an ax to grind, but there's a valuable set of lessons there. So, yeah, thanks for that.

My blood boiling just talking about it again.

Well, I'm glad it is behind you now. That's the best part. All right, ahead of us, like you said, we're going to answer Stephen's question about it. Support for your business also ahead of us. And the next thing that I'd like to do is talk about our two sponsors in more in depth, if that's okay by you, Mr. Shannon Jean.

Sounds great, man.

All right. Hey, I got something for you. You know that sound? I know that sound. I love that sound because that sound makes me happy. Because that sound means I made money. That's the sound that our first sponsor here, Shopify, gives you every single time you get a sale. And that is a wonderful thing because when you make a sale, you're making money. We talk about cash flow here all the time, right? That's the beauty. And Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. Giving people who are small businessing all the time, like you and me, the resources that were once reserved for big businesses. And the cool part about Shopify is it's totally customized for our needs and you can create a great looking online store that brings your idea to life. When I was using Shopify, Shopify gave me all the tools I needed to manage my day to day and drive sales. And Shannon, I think you use Shopify too, man. Shopify lets you make your idea and open it up into endless possibilities. It's a journey, right? But that's the beauty of entrepreneurship. You've got to check this out because it really having that part of your business together is a game changer. And I can say this from personal experience. Shopify is, is that game changer that you want. Shopify powers over 1.7 million entrepreneurs in addition to just us here. From first sale to full scale. I like that. And every 28 seconds a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify. That can be you. So you can get started building and customizing your online store with no coding or design experience. And access all of Shopify's powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with all their resources that they have. Plus they've got 24. 7 support. So you're never alone. That's a beautiful thing. Go to shopify.com SBS it's all lowercase. For a free 14 day trial and you get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Again. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.comsbs right now. One last time. Shopify.comsbs and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. You know what else you need for your small business? You need HR support. Because when running a business, HR issues can kill you. Things like minimum wage requirements, labor regulations, even wrongful termination suits. And listen, those HR manager salaries, they are not cheap. They come at an average of 70k a year. I don't really want to have to spend an extra 70k a year. Well, good news. Our sponsor, Bambi spelled B A M B E E was created specifically for us people who are small businessing all day long. You can get a dedicated HR manager, craft your HR policy, maintain your compliance, all of it, for just $99 a month. I know with Bambi, you can change HR from your biggest liability to your biggest strength. Your dedicated HR manager is available by phone, email, or even real time chat if you like. So from things like onboarding to terminations, they customize your policies to fit your business and help you manage your employees day to day, Again, all for just how much? $99 a month. And it's month to month. There's no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time. Listen, if you're like me, you didn't start your business because you wanted to spend time on HR compliance. Good news. The people at Bambi did. They're good at this. That's what you want. You want to let Bambi help. And you can get your free HR audit today. Go to Bambi.comsmall right now to schedule your free HR audit. That's Bambi.comsmall one more time spelled BAM to TheBee.comsmaller check it out. And our thanks to Bambi for sponsoring this episode. All right, we got an email from Stephen Shannon. And in it, he asked, he says, I know you guys are nerds. And he means that lovingly. Of course, he said, and that gives you the ability to solve most of your own tech problems. What do those of us business owners who aren't nerds, what are we supposed to do for our IT support? How do we go about making sure that all of the computers and phones and all the technology that we need runs the way we need it? And who do we call when it doesn't? What is your advice?

That's a great question.

It's a great question, and it's not one that I've ever had to answer for my businesses. I probably should answer it for my businesses to take me out of that, but I never have. So.

That's a good point.

Right? It's a liability. It's a strength in the beginning, but then it quickly becomes a liability because, you know, like when, whenever there's a tech problem doesn't matter, you know, what else is going on, it needs to be solved. And so I'm the one that solves it. Yeah.

And on that point, you know, before we jump in, the best, well, the best way to do it or whatever, one of the comments I'll make about getting people to work for you to handle your IT issues, it's not just how techie they are or how good of a nerd they are. It's. It's really all about problem solving. Skills and resource management.

It's troubleshooting. Absolutely. Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. Being able to. It doesn't matter if there's something wrong with your car or your website or something broke in the plumbing at your building. You want somebody that could apply troubleshooting and problem solving skills to any of those things and get to the point of, okay, I've narrowed it down. Or I've either narrowed down what the problem is or I've narrowed down who to call.

Right.

Because like, us, yeah, we're nerds and we can fix some stuff. But at some point, you may need to get someone else involved that's in charge or runs this or does that. So if you do get somebody to replace you, Dave, they just have to be good problem solving. And we would hire not for their. Typically for their technical ability, but more like, okay, you can manage all these resources we have in place because you have good troubleshooting or problem solving skills.

It's true. And I have the one thing that really was a problem for me. Again, you know, it's hard for me to say it was a problem because it was a huge asset when. When we didn't have the cash flow to outsource any of this. But the thing that, that would derail me at any point, day or night, was if we had a problem with one of our servers. Right. Like, you know, hosting the Mac observer, hosting all the ads for Backbeat. When we had a server problem, it was like it didn't matter what I was doing or where I was. Vacation, knee deep in a negotiation with someone. That all had to stop. And I. Servers down, servers down. I needed to run point on that job. And that was. That was a huge liability eventually. I mean, it was a liability out of the gate, but I could do it. And there were. I could probably point to a few times where if we didn't have. If I didn't have those skills, the business wouldn't have survived. Right. Like, because we didn't. We couldn't afford to have somebody else in house to do it at that point. And so. Sure. You know, so, like, it was a good thing until it became not a good thing and we finally outsourced that. I, I found, you know, I looked on upwork. It wasn't called upwork at the time, but, you know, whatever. Yeah. And I found a. That they're actually based in Russia. I have a long history with using Russian techies, and I've had really good luck with the right ones. You can have the wrong ones. So tread with caution if you're heading down that path. But I have some great. Two actually great teams in Russia, and one of them manages our servers for us and has been doing it for over a decade and just does a spectacular job. There are times when I need to get involved, but I don't need to run point on the operation. The last time I had to run point was when our mail server cratered because they upgraded some. You know, it was just some minor point update for something that rendered our mail server useless as we hosted our own mail server. And I realized, and it was a Saturday afternoon, I realized I was the only person on the planet that understood all. All the moving parts in our mail server. And it was like, okay, this cannot. Yeah, this is really bad. Like, if I. If I had been hit by a bus three weeks prior and then they did this upgrade, I don't think they. That problem would have been solvable. Like, I don't. I don't mean to overstate my value, but in that particular thing, like, there just wasn't. It was not documented anywhere how it was all set up and all the moving parts. It would have taken someone a long time to figure it out, if at all. And we got it fixed by finding, like, an old version of whatever we upgraded somewhere on some random archive on the Internet. And we installed it, and it got things back up and mail started to flow again. And that Monday, we moved away from ever hosting our own mail server again. But that's one way to do it, is outsource. Figure out what your technology is and outsource as much of it as you can to people. Just like we were talking about with Bambi. Right. Like, you know, don't. Unless you're an HR pro or you're so big that it actually makes sense to have an HR manager. You know, find somebody that can do it at a fraction of the cost because they're doing it for lots of companies and do that with your hosting, with, you know, but not just your web hosting, your email hosting. And then just let them manage it. And if you. If you notice a problem, you email them and they run point on the job. And that's the key. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that especially now, you know, a couple things. Things are more reliable now than they used to be.

I think this is so true. Yes.

Big deal. That's a big deal.

No, it's true. Yeah.

Outsource. Outsource, Outsource. You know, my. My take on this would have been different, you know, 10 years ago.

Oh, yeah.

But now, you know, there's so many great solutions. The thing you need to be good at now, I believe is finding the right partner that are reliable. Finding the right partner and then creating backup systems in case everything goes to hell. And like when I say reliable partners for me, and I've used these Russian programmers as well for projects, not for maintenance though, but great. But I want to be able to get a hold of someone 247 when a problem comes up or my employee needs to be able to get a hold of someone like that. So I would, you know, before you sign up for any service and go through all the rigmarole of getting the website going or your email server or whatever it is texting, call, call their customer service line and see how long it takes to reach a human or click on their chat if they have a customer service chat and see how long it takes to get somebody. You know, like I used, I don't know, maybe four years ago or so I switched to bluehost for my website and email just because of that. Because I can get a hold of them, I can get through to somebody in a few minutes and I can get someone to get right to the source of the problem. That it's priceless. Right?

Yeah.

I love chat stuff with an online ticketing, a support ticket system that you can get right to IT and explain and take snapshots and paste and you know, so an online chat thing is really important, especially if you're somewhere, if you're managing it and maybe you're somewhere where you can't take a phone call at an event, at a meeting. Yeah, you could use, you could use your phone to jump in their support portal. Hopefully they have one and use their chat feature to get a ticket open and send them graphics or text or.

Whatever the problem, start the process. Right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

The key is it's, it's like meeting these executives. In the last segment, we're talking about meeting executives at these companies before you need them. Well, it's the same with your IT things. You want to test, you want to know you can get connected with them before you need them. Like if you search for small business IT support, if you go to Google and search, it's just loaded with primarily small businesses that, that want to get hired to come take care of your IT stuff, you know, and that's great. We've, we've used a few of those people like primarily for managing our phone system and stuff over the years. It all comes down to who you can reach and how fast they can get like, you know, with my business, you know, if the phones went down, well, we were done. You know, because it was so phone driven at the time, so you had to have somebody that you could get it.

I, I had a friend who ran a web hosting company. Now this is probably 15 years ago. Right. So you know, reset your expectations. But it was a small little thing. It started just for. He did some like he was a lone wolf consultant is what I would call him. Like he went around and, you know, fixed people's computers for him, homes and small businesses and that sort of thing. And he noticed a lot of his clients needed a place to host their websites and there was no bluehost or, you know, any of that dream post or any of that stuff back then. And so he knew how to set up a server. So he co. Located a server somewhere and did that and hosted the websites. But on the support page he said all support requests are answered within one hour. That was just him. Okay. So you have to bear this in mind. All support requests are answered within one hour. If it's been an hour and your request still has not been answered, wait longer. Oh, that's what he put on there. Now that's kind of funny if you know him. Yeah, right. Like, and again, he wasn't marketing this to the general public. This was to his clients. So.

Yeah, I got it.

They already knew how, what his pacing was like before they ever were involved with him on the web hosting front. But, you know, but, but that's what you might get at a lot of these places if it's. That's right, A lone wolf. I mean, you know, as good as that person might be. And they might be fantastic and they might be the right person for your business because they're so fantastic. But know that if, unless they have an infrastructure, they will not be a 247 shop. Like it's just impossible.

Yeah. And what is the backup to that person?

Right, right.

I mean I've, I've done gone down this road with filemaker developers local. And I love using local people. Right. If, if I want to be sure.

We live in an area where there are more of them, there's a ton of them.

Yeah, exactly. You drop your hat and there's an IT guy.

Yeah.

Lives around here.

I guess that's true in most places now though. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, but the problem is you get, they get their hooks into you. Not, they're not trying to do that, but you become so reliant on them that two things if, if they go sideways or things don't quite work out, what's very problematic and you know, if your systems start to fall apart and doesn't work, you know, we use FileMaker for our entire backend infrastructure as well as when you're ready to change. It can be very difficult to migrate when someone else knows that you know everything backwards and forward, but it's difficult for some. Expect to pay the time for the next person to come in and learn the system before you can migrate to something else.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So I want to be sure we answer Steven's questions. There is no easy answer to this, but if I was not an IT person or a technical person at all, I would, number one, I would outsource as much of as I could to reliable partners that you have done some research with and know how their customer service works. You know, don't get in deep with someone and be like, oh yeah, our customer service is open from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. That's a disaster. Because no problem, Problems don't happen 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. Usually it's at, if they do, it's.

It'S at 4, 4:50 on a Tuesday afternoon.

Yes. And you'll be on hold and it'll be like, click, click, call us Monday. That, that doesn't work. You need somebody you can get a hold of at 1am on Saturday night because that's when things break. And if you have a lot of stuff going on, you're running a weekend sale and all of a sudden you need more server space. I mean you need to be able to talk to these people. There's some great hosts out there. Like I said, I use bluehost and there's tons, there's just tons of things you just need to research and get comfortable. If you use a local support business, which I think is a great idea, ask them, okay, what's your backup plan? What happens when you go on vacation? What happens if I can't reach you and we're beyond that one hour window? Right. And you know, you have to have some, something else to do. Can you, can you build a backup website that you can redirect people to that at least says something, you know, I mean if, if you go completely down, I mean you gotta ask yourself those questions.

Yeah, no, that's, that's good advice. Yeah, I, I think you're right that you want to find someone, especially if you're talking about your computers and you know, your in office IT infrastructure. You want somebody that can come and touch that stuff.

I agree. Yeah, that for sure.

You know, and, and depending on how your business operates, you might be okay waiting a day or two to, you know, to have them out and show up. And if that's a backup.

But if a computer goes down that your accountant or your bookkeeper uses, what you should be able to go, okay, grab that laptop or do whatever and.

Use this and use this. And that might save you a bunch of money. I mean, it sounds crazy having a spare computer, but I have spare computers and I'm a nerd. But, you know, just because I know how to fix it doesn't mean I have time to. To fix it at the moment that it breaks. I just need to be able to. Okay, I'm going to look at this later. I'm going to go upstairs, get on that imac and keep doing the work. And then when I have to carve out time, I will and, you know, come back down maybe eight, nine o' clock at night, you know.

Yeah.

And get it done.

Yeah, that's right. And I think that it's probably worth mentioning as well if we're talking about soft IT systems, you know, whether it's accounting, your website, whatever it is, your. Your backup system needs to be just bulletproof. Right. So if your accountant is using something and it crashes and, well, you need to be able to grab the backup from last night and get back into it and make adjustments. Not, oh, wow, we haven't backed that, that thing up for, you know, a week. If, if you're in the cloud, using a cloud service or, you know, software as a service. Awesome, wonderful. But if you're using an application locally, you need to have that automated backup system in place. I can't stress it enough how it will save you over and over and over.

And one thing I will say about backups, test restoring from a backup. I mean, you also want to make sure your backups are backing up. I have it on my calendar once a month, test backups. And I will go around. I spot check. I don't go to every computer and check it out, but I spot check a couple of machines. It's like, okay, I feel like everything's fine and, and you know, and then, and then we're good to go. But, but you got to know how to restore and you don't want to have to try and figure that out when you're in a panic. You want to know how to do it. Right? So.

So good. Yeah, very important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you got to like test that. Test that test.

Yeah.

So that, you know, it's like, oh, I know exactly what to do when you.

Yeah, not at 1 in the morning when you're freaking freaked out because you can't take orders and your website's crashing.

Yeah, no, I've done this before. I know how to do it. I got this. And then you're just good to go.

Yeah. So like, we talked about website infrastructure and stuff last, you know, a couple weeks ago and like, if, okay, You've got a WordPress site and you're running and everything gives, or what happens if you're co hosting your server or you have your own server at a, at a location, what happens if it goes down? You know, you should run that scenario and be like, okay, how do I contact them for the backup and how do they restore the back.

How does this work happen?

Yeah, you don't want to call or chat. And then they go, okay, we'll have your backup and running within 72 hours. Well, that's a disaster. You know, how does it all come back together? That's something to really do. And if you have employees. One more point I want to make. If you have employees, it's really important that you've assigned a clear line of responsibility for who's in charge of what. We had one person that just was in charge of the phone system because it was critical to us and managing it, learning how to program it, because this was. Well, even if you're off site, like we talked about grasshopper and phone.com and ringcentral, you got to learn how to set those up, you know, if, or, or get a consultant that can help you. But keeping them up and running needs to be. Somebody's in charge. And what happens if they're not there? And who's the next person that goes with you? You know, I don't know. But setting up that clear line of responsibility is, is important to do.

Yeah. So you know who to. Who, like, who to tap. Like, okay, yeah, like go make it happen. Figure it out.

That's right.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

So hopefully that gives you some insight.

Yeah.

Even on how we would, we would do it.

I, I'm, I feel like you and I are missing a piece to the answer here because we don't need the entirety of this answer. We answered certainly for what we do from our perspective. Correct. And the fact that I no longer co. Locate a server, I run a virtual instance, actually several of them, because it's a better way to do things now. And it's tall, totally there's backups and a new one can be popped into place almost instantly. You know, all of that stuff. But we haven't solved the how do you get started with this if you don't know how to get started with this? And so maybe we've shared some of that here, but I would love to hear from you out there, especially if you're not a nerd or if you know the answers, even if you are a nerd. How have, how have you gone about this? What have you done that's gotten your business into the right situation, the right scenario? So we'd love to hear from you. As Shannon said earlier in the episode. Feedbackusinessshow.co. that's where we want to hear from you. And please share it. We'll share on the show here too.

Yeah. And if you're a small business owner that does it support and you want to come on and talk about things, how you run things for your clients, or you want to share some horror stories and success stories, we would love to.

Yeah, we would love to powwow with you.

Feedbackusinessshow.co that would be great. Get in touch and we'd love to chat with you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Cool.

Thanks for listening, everybody. This has been hopefully helpful. It's certainly. I learned, I learned quite a bit, especially in the first segment. Like, it's just such a good thing to think about what's going to happen. And I mean, we talked about troubleshooting throughout this entire episode. That's really what we're doing, right? You know, you had a problem and you figured out how to solve it. Then we talked about how to solve different kinds of problems, but really if you zoom out, the solutions aren't all that difficult. All that different. Right. It was figure out how to solve your problem before you have the problem. That that is the key to this episode. So share your thoughts with us. Feedback@businessshow.com yeah, I don't know. I got. You got anything else, man? Or we.

No, that's it. That's it this week. I look forward to next week and connecting and learning more.

Yeah, absolutely. Listen, check out our sponsors. Shopify. Com, sbs, Bambi. Com Small and do us a favor, keep living that charmed life, would you?

See you next week.