A little while back I had an experience that taught me to be prepared for the worst. I went to work for the day after spending a lot of time the night before working on Leadership Done Right. At the time, I was beginning to get a lot of traffic on the site and things were really starting to pick up. Then midway through the afternoon, I received a text message from my wife asking me if I had done something to Leadership Done Right when I was home for lunch. I texted her back that I hadn’t done anything and asked her why she was asking. She had gone on the site to check some things out and found that all she got was a message that said, “Sorry! This site is not currently available.” She immediately thought that I had done something to this site.
When I got her message, I immediately went to the site and got the same message. I then tried to go in through the back door as an administrator and got a message saying that the site I was looking for did not exist. At that point I almost had a panic attack… Okay, not really, but I was very nervous because I heard a story a little while back about someone that had their website canceled by WordPress.com without receiving any message or warning. They didn’t even get an explanation for why their site was canceled.
In the back of my mind I was wondering if the same thing had happened to me. Was my site going to be canceled? Well, long story short, later this afternoon the site came back on board without me having to do anything. The only explanation I can think of is that there was some type of a glitch that temporarily shut down the website.
Have you learned to be prepared for the worst?
Even though I was a boy scout and lived the motto of “Be Prepared” for many years I had not learned my lesson to be prepared for the worst. After going through this experience, I realized I came way too close to losing everything. I was unprepared for my site to go down. If the site had gone down permanently, I would have lost everything. Prior to this experience, I had never backed up the data on this site. I had no backup plan in place to recover my data. After going through this experience, I made a point to back up all my data. I am now going to backup all my data on a weekly or monthly basis, so that if the site ever does go down I have a complete record of all my data.
How can you be prepared for the worst?
I recommend five steps to take to be prepared for the worst.
1. Identify the worst that could happen.
What is the worst that could happen to your website, company, job, etc.? If you lost your job, your company went under, your website went down, or any one of many other things happened to you, what would happen to you?
2. Identify your backup plan.
What will you do if the worst happens to you? Will you dig into your savings account? Will you use credit cards like they are going out of style? Would you move out of your house or sell off your toys?
3. Identify what you would do to recover.
Once you have thought about the worst case scenario and your backup plan, identify what you would do to recover. Think about what you would do if your worst case scenario happened. For example, if I lost my job I would backup plan [cut the cable, get rid of cell phones, start draining my savings, etc.] then I would recovery plan [go out and look for a new job, start my own company, go live some place else, etc.]
4. Identify how you will live once you begin your recovery.
Once you start your recovery plan, how will you live then? Will you change any of your habits that lead to the worst happening in the first place? Will you change your outlook on life? Be specific in what you would do differently once your recovery plan starts to happen if the worst happened to you.
5. Determine what you need to do differently NOW to keep the worst from happening and be prepared for the worst.
Once you understand all the worst that could happen and the road you could go down, what do you need to do differently now to avoid it or be better prepared? In my case, I need to back up my website regularly so that I don’t lose everything. What do you need to do differently?
As a leader, what have you done to be prepared for the worst? Have you looked at your weaknesses and put a backup plan in place to help you overcome them? What have you done to set up your backup plan? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!
I have been thinking whether I should go it alone and put myself out there via a website, career crossroads crisis (3Cs !) so this is good advice for anyone even thinking of it.
Welcome Sonia,
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and share your thoughts. I am glad that this post is helpful to you!