Business Continuity - Keeping Your Business Running When Life Happens

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Businesses. This episode, and this is the Building Better Developers podcast, Develop-a-Nor podcast. I'll get you the other stuff in a minute. First, I want to throw the little teaser out that we are going to talk about business continuity. What happens when life happens, basically? Well, when life happens to me, I say, Rob Brodhead, because that's who I am, why don't you take advantage of this thing and find a way to solve a problem? And one of the problems I solved was that there wasn't a podcast called Develop-a-Nor about Building Better Developers. I happen to be one of the founders of said podcast, also a founder of RB Consulting and a person that sometimes takes a very long time to get to the point that he was trying to get to, as I just showed you. But with RB Consulting, we are a boutique consulting company. What we do is we step beside you. We work with you to understand your business. In doing so, I just want to like, something I haven't mentioned before is in you describing your business to us and what is your secret sauce and what is it that makes you you makes you and your business unique actually is a very good journey for any entrepreneur or business owner to go through because when you really step back and say, I'm going to explain the inner workings of my company to somebody else, it really does help you sort of review those and go like, wow, do I really want to do that? Is that how we do it? Do we really need to do that still? Because that's part of the conversation and where we take you is I'll get your business and your secret sauce and we help craft a recipe for you for technology, for how to build your team, how to get your all of your devices and your applications and things like that through innovation, integration, simplification, automation. We find ways for you to take your technology sprawl, wrangle that thing in, put a nice little pretty bow on it and leverage it so that you're often one of your most expensive investments other than your employees. You can get the most out of it and that can help you and your business today, tomorrow, six months from now, six years from now even. That's what we bring to the table and when we walk away, usually everybody is well fed and ready to go tackle their own day in whatever way that is. Good thing, bad thing. It might be a bad thing you think that it took me too long on that introduction, but this time around we're going to go with the good thing, bad thing. The good thing is, and I've sort of had this recently, business. Business has been really well, got a lot of stuff going on. So there is a steady stream of stuff coming in. The bad thing is, and this is something we'll probably talk about in another one and we have touched on before, is that we were not as prepared for the growth as we would have liked to be. We are literally at a point of maybe adding people and stuff like that, which you can't just go out and check a box on a website and then boom, you've got another person. It's sometimes almost like that if you look at some of the sites that are out there, but for what we're looking for, we've got to spend a little more time, a little more investment and we got a little bit surprised at how fast things have moved and how things have changed and that's the world we live in today. So it's good and bad. It's like, hey, we've got a lot of business and it's a, honestly, the bad, it's a good bad to have. It's a good problem for us to be working through. Also good is that I get to spend yet another episode with Michael and he's going to introduce himself, whether he does it good or bad. Thanks Rob. Hey everyone, my name is Mike Kamalos. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, otherwise known as Developer Nur. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help businesses who are having bad days of technology, where their technology or software is not working for them. We are a software consulting business where we come in and we can help you build custom software. We can help you take the existing software you have. We can help you fix it. We can help you test it. We can help you basically make your customers happy or make your experience with your own software better. We also help you walk through the user experience. We help you understand what it is that you need out of your software, what it is that your software really does. And we kind of fill in the holes. We help you understand that, hey, are you paying for what you need or do you need to chuck that out the window and get something better to basically make your life easier, make your business grow and to hopefully scale faster and make everyone happy. Good and bad. Well, kind of with what I was just saying there, we have run into some issues as well where scalability is kind of good, kind of bad. I'm looking to grow my company more towards the second half of the year. And like Rob said, it's not real easy to just go out and grab someone off the Internet and say, hey, come work for me. You kind of got to be careful. You want to make sure that the people you get kind of meet your mission, that work with you, that kind of have the same goals in mind that you have. And that's been a little difficult. So that's kind of the bad thing. I haven't really been able to find someone yet. But the good thing is I am able to look. I'm starting to grow. And so that's kind of my good, bad in this situation. So what this actually sort of goes into that a little bit is business continuity is what I want to talk about. And this is something that, again, I think it seems like particularly like solopreneurs or side hustles or small businesses, stuff like that. We really don't tend to think about it until we get into it. And then by the time we're out of it, we forget about it. And what it is, is what happens when things get in the way for business continuity. And it goes a little bit into disaster recovery. It's things like, but it's really not so much about recovering. It's about continuing business as usual when non-business as usual things occur. Now, in a small business, this very often will be things like life events, like suddenly somebody goes on maternity leave. Or somebody's got, has a, you know, takes two weeks of vacation. Or, you know, they've got, they end up an accident and they end up in a hospital or they're sick or they got to deal with a relative or all these things that life throws at us, they can disrupt business. What we want to do is be able to avoid doing that. Now, if we are a one person shop, if life hits us, it's probably going to hit our business. Now, not always. There are some things we can do. We can build automations. We can do things that allow business to continue on even when we're not a part of it. And honestly, that is like really one of the goals we should have is to be able to have our business just hum along and not need us. If you want to see like that, you know, done, I guess, right or whatever, and get a lot of hints on it, it goes back to one of our favorites is go to four hour work week. There's a lot of stuff there that is really focused on automating your business. And it's not really, it's not always implementation as much of its ideas, some thoughts, some things you can do to scale your business out without having to fully scale your business out or to let it grow as it needs to grow and shrink as it needs to shrink, hopefully never the latter. With business continuity, it is going to be things like what happens if I take a week off, maybe it's for you, what happens if I take a day off? What happens if I get sick for a day? Is my business going to suddenly shut down for a day? If I have a holiday, if I have, you know, if I take a vacation, if I go somewhere and I am not connected to my business for a while, will it continue? Do I have, as we grow, I think it comes more, have I empowered the people around me, my team, my company, do they have what they need to do the job or am I still holding too tightly onto things? And that's going to keep them from getting things done if I disappear for a while. There's always going to be tasks that we take on that we're like, okay, I need to take this task and do it, but maybe it's something that, and it may be something that you do, that's, you're the best person in the company that does it. That's great. But if you're not available for, let's say a week, is it still valuable for that to just now be delayed or is it something where you should want to be able to give that off to somebody else so they can keep the ball moving forward? And this is, I think one of the things that we struggle with the most as entrepreneurs, as business leaders is that we don't always scale ourselves out properly. We're not delegating enough. We have too much stuff still in our head. We don't have all of these processes in place. And I say this as someone that is very much in the middle of this, is trying to expand some things out that has been very comfortable and very, and, you know, honestly successful doing things without having to scale up. But now when you want, you know, it's time to grow. It's time to start shifting some of those things. It becomes very difficult because there's a lot to do. There are a lot of things that we take for granted, but if we're suddenly not in the picture, it's like, okay, well, how does that get done? And it may be as simple as like, for me as a technology kind of guy early on, it was things like people having access to the servers that I could log on to on a regular basis. So if a site goes down, does somebody have access to the stuff they need so they can log onto the server and restart it and get those things going? But there's going to be bigger things like that. There are going to be things like, you know, if, if you have, for example, like let's say you've scheduled some, some training sessions or some customer sales calls or something like that, do you have essentially a backup? Do you have some way for that stuff to continue? If somebody quits, if you have a person on your team, particularly a small team, and they quit, are you going to be able to sort of pick up and go? And that may be that you're going to stumble for a minute or it's going to, it's not going to be just super smooth, but are you going to be able to continue business as usual when these things occur? And I'll flip this over to Michael and see what are some of your thoughts on this and maybe some of your experiences with it? So, yeah, we constantly refer back to the four hour work week because there was a lot of good information in that for starting out and kind of preparing yourself. And one of the interesting things Tim Ferriss talked about was extracting himself from his company. Cause like you said, you know, when we're like the solepreneur or we're, we build the business from scratch, we know every in and out of the business and it's very hard for us to let go or divvy out the work. Part in part for those fears of if I give it to someone, are they going to quit? And then am I going to have to take that back? How am I going to handle that? The other thing is what happens if they get hit by a bus or God forbid, you know, some illness happens like COVID, you know, how is your business going to survive when a pandemic hits? We talked about disaster recovery in the last episode, but in this one, you have to think a little bit differently. It's not just all about disaster recovery. This is about business processes and how to keep your business running smoothly. So you can scale, so you can grow and keep things moving when essentially people disappear or when things happen that you have to keep the lights on the business running, even if the lights are off and you're not able to get to a computer. Case in point, one of the biggest ones I'll talk about here is financial information. So one of the critical things that hit me, and I talked about this last time was my business account has been hit by the bank as I got hit with a fraud alert. I got locked out of my system, which has now made me start to concern is, okay, what happens to me since I am, you know, the owner of the company, I have access to all the financial information. No one else does. So if I were to get hit by a bus or I were to get sick or go on vacation, are the bills still going to get paid? I have automation in place to pay a lot of these things, but you still, it's scary because you have to essentially give some of the keys to your financial information. So you have to make sure you have the right person you can trust to have access to these. So if something does happen to you, they can get into your system and make sure that the bills still get paid, that people can get paid, payroll is handled. So those are a lot of things you don't think about at all. And it's just one of those things where it's like, Oh crap. You know, you have one of those moments where it's like, Oh wait, whoops. The other thing that's interesting is, you know, vacation, PTO sick days, depending on your type of business. If you are very heavily customer support driven, you better make sure you have a system in place or people in place. Not one, you do not want a single point of failure when you're dealing with customer service, especially if you're dealing with tech support or help, you better have someone by you. I don't care if they're a part-time, whatever, hire someone, find someone cheap, find a high school kid or a kid in college to help you at least test the idea of scaling up your customer support so that you have more than one point of failure. And that's the other thing for business continuity, similar to disaster recovery, but this is more internal business or working. So the business, what are the single points of failure that are going to cause your business to fail? Because you have not thought about scaling. You have not thought about, okay, if I'm not here doing it or this person's not here doing this, can the work get done? So again, I keep referring to single point of failure, but in this particular context, anything in your business that is a single point of failure where there's only one person doing it, do you have processes in place to get access to the work that they're doing? Do you have a Dropbox or a shared network folder where everyone puts their information or are they putting it on their local machines and oops, that laptop gets broken or they lose the laptop or their car stolen and the laptop's gone? How do you get that information? Is your business going to be impacted? So these are just some of the things that I think of when I think business continuity. It's not necessarily just disaster recovery, but this is business. How am I going to keep the business working? How am I going to keep my customers happy? How am I going to get the work done if something were to happen to me or if life happens? You know, if my daughter decides she wants to have a baby and suddenly I'm out for a week being a grandpa, how am I going to keep the business going? So these are the types of questions that come to mind when I hear business continuity. And this is, I think it's not just emergencies and stuff like that. And I just have to point out, it is very funny that you said somebody gets hit by a bus or God forbid a pandemic. It's like, okay, you just got hit by a bus. No big deal. But the pandemic, whoa, that's a big deal. I know it is a scale of things, but it is one of those things. It's just very amusing how we raise our stuff. But I want to go back to the, actually you brought up a great point with the whole idea of like, what happens if there is some positive thing that happens in your life that you want to enjoy and you don't get to because you didn't figure out how to allow your business to continue. And I trust me, I have lived this. I do it on a regular basis where I'm like, dad, I would love to do this thing, but I can't because I have these other obligations and they are, it is the kind of thing that's like, if you're serious about your business, if this doesn't, if this ever bothers you and it's just a side hustle, you're like, ah, no big deal. Then it's always going to be a little bit of a side hustle and you're just not as serious about it. And if you lose customers and things like that, then you're going to have to deal with that and just say, well, okay, it's because that's not as important. If you want to build a business, if you want to have customers that trust you and all that kind of stuff, you have to find ways to be there and get these things done. And sometimes it's very difficult. These are the things that we don't talk about often enough, probably as entrepreneurs, is that it is really, really difficult to let it all go for a while and go away and unplug and chill. We don't get to do that very often, but that's what business continuity will do for you is as you're going through these exercises and putting these things in place, it will allow you to actually step away from your business. And sometimes this is critical, even not even for your health, but so that you can actually work on your business instead of in your business, which is another thing that is, right. I'm living it right now. I would love to spend more time. There's so many things I would like to do on my business, but I'm too busy in the business right now because I need to work on some of these continuity things and build some of these pieces out. And it's sometimes good to have that problem because then it's like, it's a pain point that something's going to poke you on a regular basis. You're like, okay, I've got to change this. I got to move this. I've got to adjust this. I've got to hire a person, whatever it is, so that you can put the things in place to allow your business to continue. Whether that's without you, without some critical, key person that's part of your business, all those things that can happen that can cause your business to stumble. Put these things in place so you don't have to. Now, I will add to all of this is that it doesn't have to be, and I think this is where too often we get stuck, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be that the business continuity is a hundred percent the same as when it's in its normal phase that when we move into, we'll say business continuity, that it right away is exactly the same and nobody notices. It's okay if people notice. It's things like, it's okay if you have an out of office response on your email that says, hey, I'm out of office, but send all of your stuff to any questions to this person and they will be able to take care of it or they'll be able to help you out if there's an emergency and things like that. It doesn't, yes, it's an extra step for them, but it does allow things to continue. It's not perfect. And maybe eventually they'll just go straight to that person if that's what you want, or if not, you will be, you will come back, you will recover whatever it is, and then they can return business as normal can, you know, business as usual can return thoughts on those. Yeah. So that made me think of one additional thing. So as in a lot of our podcasts, we've talked about automating your business, find common tasks and automate those. If, especially when we're starting out and you're bootstrapping your business, you are typically going to do a lot of that. You're going to have a lot of these automation things in place, like backing up systems, automating systems, keeping things running smoothly. The problem is six months, a year from now, two years from now, if one of those breaks, you're going to forget about, and this is a very good point to think about, especially when you grow your business or with, you know, working with your customers, make sure you have some type of documentation around these in a central location that is backed up and shared. So if something happens to any person that is working with a system or doing a process that even if it's automated, you have a way to go say, okay, this is how it's supposed to work. So if it goes down, you have a way to recover. This is an example. Like one of the things I was thinking about is just the, it got a little bit lost on that for a second is the podcast itself and blogs and things like that. If you are a content producer, is there is, we've talked about the regular scheduled things that you want to hit. It's just like payroll and people want to get paid. They don't like it when their paycheck doesn't show up on the day that they're supposed to get paid, but we also have business things that we're supposed to do. We have, in this case, I'm going to go directly into this, so the development or podcast, as you probably know, and if you don't, you should listen to more of these, we release on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And if I'm incorrect in that, Michael correct me, but I think we've done this for a while and earlier on we did Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And we've, we have talked about, if you do a podcast, if you do a blog that you want to have stuff in the can, you want to have stuff that is ready to go in case something happens and you're not able to hit your, your normal routine. And a lot of times it's, but your normal routine should include doing extra things because sometimes something could happen and you're going to miss a week, miss a month, whatever it is, then you need to be able to go and say, okay, well, we're ahead of the game, we can absorb that and we can move forward. And so that's something that would be like, that is very near and dear to our heart is that we want to be able to have things in place so that, for example, if one of us, Michael or I have something going on and we can't record, then, you know, in our case, we always have the worst case, it's a solo podcast for a, you know, an episode or two. But ideally we don't want that to happen. So we want to make sure we're ahead of the game. So if we miss a week, then it's like, okay, we missed a week. We'll just go back to the, we'll go to our, you know, our scheduled stuff and we're off and running. So there's, there are very practical things that will basically help your sanity when things happen and does make it so that in general, things are not as urgent. And then it allows you to not have to get into the, effectively what it is, is the wait until the day before your final exam and then start to study really hard for that test. This is something that that's what really business continuity is about. And it's, it's that same kind of mindset is that like, look, things are going to happen. I don't want to be stuck in, like, I don't want to procrastinate. I don't want to be stuck on this stuff where at the last second I got to do it. And then I got to like just slam it home and I'm not going to have the quality that I want instead. Make sure that we're building these things as we go and putting things in place and contingency plans basically, so that we can handle the disaster recovery part. Closing thoughts before we go to the challenge. Yeah. So again, business continuity, you know, take a look at yourself and your business and identify those single point of failures. Look for what can your business do if you are not there or you pull someone out of the business, will the business continue to run, do a self analysis of the business. Now I don't want to steal from what the challenge is going to be, but personally you should do this not just once in a while, but work this into like once a quarter, once a week, always review your processes for points of failure and to make sure that you have coverage. And this is something, this is the challenge is go into your, this week and actually you can even do this now, look at the week behind. What happens if you weren't available? Let's say a week ago, some life event, pick whatever one it is. It could be as simple as you got sucked into March madness and you just really spent a lot more time doing that than you wanted to. It could be you had a bad allergy day or you know, whatever it is, or it could be you're just sick and tired for a little bit and you need some rest. What happens if you're not there? What was in place? What do you have in place so that you could, I don't know, reach out to somebody, set a couple of flags or, you know, do a couple of things and then be like, okay, I'm not going to be available for a while or that somebody else could pick it up and say, oh, you are out, you know, you're not available for a while. So here's the things that need to be done. Take a look at that. What would you need to do? Is it, would that have happened if you just decided not to show up for work Monday, would everything have flowed properly? And if not, what are the things that wouldn't, what needed to be done? And then whether it is telling those people and putting those things in place to say, okay, if this ever happens, then do this, or just having a document, sometimes a business continuity document process procedure folder would is just as useful if not more so, cause it's like, Hey, if somebody doesn't show up, if I don't show up, here's where you go to figure out what this stuff does. And honestly, you should have this for everybody in your team. There should be something, there should be a place you can go to it says, Hey, somebody was sick today. This is what their normal stuff is. This is where they're at so that you can pick it up and, and, you know, keep things moving forward. That is your challenge is look back. How do you fix it? And then of course, the followup is that fix it, put those procedures in place and let's get that going for you. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. As always, you can reach out to us info at developerneur.com for email. You can go out to the developerneur.com site and leave us contact form information. You can leave us a response, some, any kind of review and responses you can do wherever you get the podcast out on the developerneur channel, out on YouTube, X no longer Twitter. You can go out there and you can leave comments there. We are at developerneur.com. We have a Facebook page. You can go out there and leave us stuff. Love to hear from you, your war stories, your suggestions, your comments, your feedback, all that stuff we take into account. We very much, we hold it near and dear to our heart and we use that to build, you know, future episodes and even future seasons. So you help us help you as they say. But for now, my final challenge of this episode is for you to go out there and have a shelf, a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. 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