Business Disasters Avoided by Simple Planning

Monday morning, I got a call from an auctioneer informing me of an auction this week. Usually auctions are fun places to be for business owners.  You pickup equipment for fraction of their original costs and mingle with other business owners who usually are in the same type of industry.

This auction however was not easy to attend since it was taking place at a friend’s place of business. A local printer who was not only a smart and diligent businessman, but also very good at what he did, “an artist”. As we walked around his shop I was impressed by his top of the line press equipment, best computer systems with the most up to date software. His walls were pasted with awards and samples of his award winning products. His now unemployed workers however, were walking around offering their help and time to anyone who was looking for help at a discount. I could not help but to ask my friend, what happened? He promised to explain the story to me after the auction was over.

I could not bring myself to buy anything that day, but waited until the end of the auction when everyone was gone, sat down with him and he told me the story. The printing business like any other, has become digital. More and more of the information which was in a form of a hard copied document of plates and negatives, filling many file cabinets are converted to a digital files, a folder in a file somewhere on a desktop. Like any smart business owner he had religiously backed up all his files which consisted of everything from a simple business card to a hundred page book, magazines, posters, forms, contracts, etc. He would back up all the files, one disk this week another disk another week. He would also keep these removable disks elsewhere for safekeeping. Since this was the most valuable asset of his business and without these digital graphic files he simply had nothing to produce.

Now fast forward to 2 months ago. We got a big storm and the drain on his roof got clogged. At 1:00 am part of the roof collapsed flooding the building and the computers. His business insurance would kick in to pay for the repair of the presses but not recovery of his data. He was not worried since he had the backups. As he connected his backup disks to a new computer trying to recover the data, he realized that files that showed up on the screen could not be opened. All this time he was backing up his information to a corrupted backup system. He had not taken the time, opening the files and examining them for accuracy in years. All was lost.

This is a dangerous mistake that many business owners are committing every day, how many businesses actually take the time to create usable backups? How many know how to create a usable backup? Who actually checks the accuracy of these backups once they are created? In this digital age, the information contained on these files is the most valuable asset of our business. We should protect them not just for our sake but for our client’s sake, these are not just our assets, but theirs also and they have trusted us with their safe keeping.

Shanin Samaei is the President of Print4Less located in Boca Raton, Florida.

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