546 – How to keep things running: Tom talks Business Survival

Episode 546 – Business Survival
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and forty six of Screw the Commute podcast today we're going to talk about business survival, and these are some of the things you should have in place before some kind of disaster strikes and. This is going to be a short episode, but that don't let that fool you into thinking that I don't think this is really, really, really important. This is all kinds of stuff that you got to do that aren't related to making money other than the fact if you don't do them, you aren't going to make any money. All right. So let's get into it now. Make sure please make sure you pick up a copy in my automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me for it because if you just do a little bit of this stuff, it'll knock your workload down like crazy and it'll increase your speed of getting the customers and prospects faster. So grab a copy that screw the e-commerce automate free. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app, so you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:01:40] Now we're still going strong with our pilot program to help persons with disabilities in my school get scholarships, teach them internet and digital marketing. See for them to go to school is a massive, massive production compared to persons that don't have disabilities. So this way they can legitimately learn from home and legitimately be hired from home, which kind of cracks me up because I've been preaching that for 23. Twenty four years. And since the pandemic came along, everybody says, Oh, you can work from home. I didn't realize that, well, yeah. So I've been doing it myself. Forty five years now since it's the new year. It's now forty five years. So yes, you can work from home, so we're going to get them hired or in their own business or both. And I'm just really proud of this program, so please help us out with it. We have a Go Fund Me campaign helping to finance all the scholarships at you can go to my school website. That's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, and that's IMTCVA.org/disabilities and that's of course going to be in the show notes. And you can see videos of these people. Two of them are blind. They're in the program, shooting videos, and anything it can kick in is great. If, hey, if you're really flush with cash, you could sponsor a whole person yourself. How about that something you can really be proud of?

[00:03:13] All right, let's get to the main event, so the first thing I want to talk about is some physical things you need to keep your to keep your business running.

[00:03:22] I mean, you have storms, snow, tornadoes, heavy rains, high winds, all of those things can knock out your electricity. Really, how long could your business survive without electricity? Think about it. How much money would you lose by not being able to talk to prospects or get email from customers or go without your internet? Probably you couldn't last that long, and your batteries only last so long, so you need a way to generate electricity. Now you have options here. A built in generator, a portable generator, solar or wind. But we see how well they did in Texas, the solar and the wind when that storm hit Texas. So. So we're thinking about either generators or portable generators now. There are plenty of articles and videos online how to pick the right size generator for your situation. Now, you have to consider things like the amount of electricity you use just to get by refrigerator, freezer, cooking, heat, air conditioning, basic lights and basic plugs in the place you need them. I mean, I have three generators here at the Retreat Center. One is built in and comes on automatically if the power goes out after about 15 seconds. I have two other portable generators and enough fuel to run them for several days.

[00:04:50] Now, just a moment ago, I said plugs in the place you need them. Now, why did I say in the place you need them? Well, because it's likely that a generator big enough to run your entire house would be prohibitively expensive. Usually you size them to make sure the basics are covered, but not the entire house. I mean, if I had to have a generator that would run my entire house, it would be enormous and probably cost $30000 or more. Right. I have four air conditioning units and heat pumps just in the main building and two others in the in the studio. I mean, we got seven thousand five hundred square feet, tons of rooms, and that doesn't count. Like I said, the four thousand square feet of my TV studio and garage. So the main building runs on one point two kilowatts, and that takes care of basic kitchen stuff, my office, phone system, internet and a couple critical circuits in bedrooms, bath and living rooms. Not the whole place. Also, when you have a built in generator, the cost of the generator isn't nearly the entire cost of the installation. You have to have a special transfer switch put in by a certified electrician to make sure the electricity you are generating doesn't go out of your house, up the electric lines and kill literally kill someone from the electric company who's working on the lines to get the electricity going again.

[00:06:38] Now with portable generators. Don't even think about hooking them into your electrical system unless you have an electrician, install one of these switches with a way for you to safely hook your portable generator up to the switch. Most of the time, you're just going to use extension cords and make sure that you don't overload them and set your house on fire. All right. You want to use higher gauge, and the higher number is a smaller wire. So if you say, Oh, I got this 16 gauge, it's better than the 12 gauge. No, it isn't. It's opposite 12 gauge gauges bigger and can handle more electricity than 14 or 16 gauge. So don't use dinky little extension cords and set your house on fire because of this. All right, so, so. But you can get portable generators for several hundred dollars small ones and you can go up to the thousands. All right. But but at any rate, look into how to pick one for your size house or if you have if you're flush with cash, get a one installed that automatically kicks on and runs as much as you can in the house. And then as soon as you get that going. Make sure you charge up all your batteries for your phone, your flashlights, computer back, battery backups, radios, whatever else you need that runs on batteries.

[00:08:03] In case you run out of fuel, you'll still have some battery power left. Now, what if your internet goes up well, you have options here, too? You can learn how to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot. And that is if your system allows it. Now I have a Verizon, my fi box, it's about half the size of a deck of cards that maybe close three quarters of the size of a deck of cards. And I use it when I'm traveling. If it's faster than the hotel WiFi, but if my internet goes out, I can fire it up and use it in the interim until the internet is back on. Now be careful, though, when you're on one of these kind of systems because you're using cellular data and you could get a giant bill for overages depending on the plan that you have. But it'll keep you going for critical internet usage. Now, if you go out into civilization, you may be able to go to a coffee shop or somewhere else that has WiFi. But keep in mind, chances are, you aren't the only one that had this idea. Ok? The place could be packed with limited plug ins for electricity. And so I always keep a multi plug adapter in my laptop case and then I'm the hero when a bunch of people can now plug in. Now, I've been known to just leave it and buy another one for a bunch of people were depending on it, and again, I'm the hero.

[00:09:35] Now when you're on one of these public Wi-Fi guys, now if you haven't set up a VPN, a virtual private network to log into how you're really at risk, you know, with any critical information. So I would again. Vpns are very cheap. Call your hosting service or just look up VPNs. Read about them a little bit and you can get them on your your cell phone, on your tablets, on your laptop, and you connect through a secure, encrypted thing even though you're using their Wi-Fi. So VPNs will protect you if you're forced to be on other stuff, use them all the time, like in anywhere that it's a public situation, hotels or or anywhere you are at risk. The hackers are really slick. They can they can get you now. VPNs will slow down your connection a little bit, so keep that in mind, too. So there's nothing wrong, it's just slower. Now, another thing I do when buying a laptop is to buy an extra battery when I buy the laptop. Now if you keep the laptop for several years like I do, it's going to be hard to find a replacement battery for your model laptop. So I always have extra capacity. And you can also get large universal laptop batteries or basically their power sources that you can take with you.

[00:11:00] Some of them are, you know, long and flat, or they're like the size of a laptop, but they're real skinny, and they could slide down in your laptop case. But they're a giant battery so that you can power your stuff for sometimes days with those things. All right, now, let's talk about backups. Now I harp on this and I harp on this and I harp on this, and inevitably someone that's followed me for years calls up frantic because they crashed and lost a bunch of their work. Now, it's hard to have sympathy for you if you haven't made it a point to do backups to multiple places, including the cloud I have for cloud accounts, some places give you so much storage when you use their service. So I have four of them and and I have some portable hard drives which are very which are very cheap nowadays to back up stuff locally because that's important too, because if you can't get to the cloud, because your internet's down, your stuff may be safe up in the cloud, but you don't have access to it. So having some portable hard drives locally is a good idea. Also, never, never, ever just depend on the cloud or some online service to be the only place you keep your data and contacts if they get hacked or have a problem, you lose everything.

[00:12:28] And it just happened to a student of mine that she hasn't been around for a while, but she depended on an online service. Something went wrong, lost her like ten thousand email subscribers. It took her years to develop. So don't let that happen to you. All right, now, you've got places like Dropbox, Carbonite, iCloud and other places that are dirt cheap and or free, sometimes the certain amount is free depending on the amount of stuff you have, and most can be automated, so you don't have to think about it. Also, there's plug ins for your website that can back it up to some place, like Amazon S3 is a great place, so you don't have to worry about your hosting service getting hacked and this happened to me. It was my hard lesson years and years ago when I had Antion.com and the hosting service was bragging about how they had backups. Yeah, they had a million backups and they got they went down and my site got lost and it took them 10 days to restore it. 10 days to my business. Now is a lot of money, folks. So. So don't only depend on your hosting service, always back your your website up to somewhere else too. So you have multiple backups. You can still make a copy and keep it locally too. Ok, business insurance. Now I did a whole episode on this. It's Episode 109, so you go screwthecommute.com/109.

[00:14:10] Now you can get insurance on any number of things, including if you, your key employees get sick or incapacitated or you do. I really suggest you listen to that insurance episode. That's one. Oh, nine, and be careful with your deductibles and you know, all kinds of stuff lightning you got to consider, you know, floods, tree damage. You know, we had tree damage here with the high winds and, you know, just all kinds of potential stuff. So you've got to make sure you pay attention to your insurance policies and check episode 109 for that. Now, do you have a disaster plan? This would be a series of what if questions that tell people what to do in case bad things happen, like what if our dedicated server goes down? Who do we call for help? What if a storm knocks out the internet? Where do we keep the MiFi device? What if the owner gets in a hunting accident, gets operated on is an intensive care for a week and in the hospital for two weeks? Guess where I got that scenario? So formulate a disaster plan and let people know where it is and even go over it with them to make sure everybody understands it, because just because you have it, if they don't know how to access certain things or get certain places with pass codes and user IDs or whatever it takes, then you're still screwed.

[00:15:38] OK. How about multiple ways to make money? Another thing that's important to business survival is to have multiple ways to bring in revenue. It's the old all your eggs in one basket kind of deal if something goes wrong. And as much as I love the internet stuff. You know, made a fortune on it over many years, I still have rental properties and other investments. I also have a wide range of skills outside of the internet that would allow me to earn money if the whole internet thing went to hell. It's really important to have skills that are marketable, because not only can you make money selling those skills, you don't have to pay for those services and skills when you know how to do them yourself. So this is by no means a comprehensive business survival guide, but if you address these basics, you'll be well on your way to ensuring your business can weather any storm. So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Hey, give us a hand on that pilot program we have for persons with disabilities that they're very inspiring people and and it's something you can really, really be proud of when they get hired and and it's really changing their lives.

[00:17:00] So there we go. All right. We'll get you on the next episode. See you later.

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