Monday morning a series of really powerful storms rolled into Atlanta leaving many residents, including yours truly, without power for a good part of the day. By the time the power company restored my services, I was already behind on my tasks for the day. I ended up working late that night to catch up.
The next day, I had to go to the hospital due to a family emergency. Thankfully I was not on deadline, but I now expect to be scrambling from now until Friday to remain on course with everything I'm working on.
Dealing with the unexpected
The thing is, when you run a business and others are counting on you to deliver the goods, having no power or a sick relative is not the client's problem. They still want the completed project as promised – especially if money has exchanged hands. I was able to get quite a bit of work done on both days thanks to my trusty Neo Alpha Smart Dana (a steal of a deal on ebay) and three AAA batteries. I worked offline Monday using research material I had printed the night before, and I also worked in the waiting room at the hospital on Tuesday. Later each evening all I had to do was upload the documents to my computer.
Create a back up plan
Still, I realize that as a solo-entrepreneur, I need to create an even better back up plan in anticipation of the unexpected which is bound to occur at some time or other. I've been fortunate up to this point to meet all of my deadlines with no real problems. But why leave things to chance? How do you handle unexpected situations that could affect your ability to come through for your clients?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I try to stay far ahead of the work. Even if I don't send it to them too far before the due date (because otherwise they start expecting it), I try to complete it early. That way, if something goes wrong, I can still get to another facility and shoot it off.
And: backup on multiple media.
Good advice - especially the part about backing up your work on more than one media source.
Post a Comment