Are You Really Prepared?

As I write this post there is about three feet of water sitting in my basement. Here in metro Atlanta we have been subjected to obscene amounts of rainfall which have overflowed rivers and completely flooded entire communities resulting in destroyed homes, widespread power outages and much worse.

The inconvenience of it all

Because our water heater is conveniently located in the basement, the amount of water rose above the elevated platform it sits upon and extinguished the pilot light. That means heating water on the stove, old school, to heat bathwater and dish water until we can pump the water out and reignite the pilot.

As irritated as we feel about having to pump water from the basement for the second time in four days, we also realize how grateful we should be that it wasn’t much worse. A minor inconvenience I can live with. During the storms I worked, met pending deadlines and made money. And that got me thinking, what would I have done if my entire home was flooded? What if my computers and other electronics were destroyed? My laptop recently died, so what then?

What would you do?

I would have been screwed. To be honest, I have no real emergency plan in place should the unthinkable happen. Although I missed the real destruction of this disaster by a few hairs, it’s been a serious wake up call for my business. I’ve mentioned my desire to create residual income here before, however now I see the necessity of creating multiple layers of income.

If Mother Nature had decided to point her finger at our home, I would not be making money right now because I have created a business around a single stream of income.

Have you ever really looked at your own business model and considered the many different scenarios that could potentially affect your income?