Since last weeks Issues with Google I’ve been thinking a lot about control and how relinquishing control to others can cause us numerous problems.
When we start our own businesses we do it partly so we can take control of our own destiny. But how many aspects of our businesses are we really in control of?
If I achieve nothing else from this article, I at least want you to have a think about aspects of your business that you’re not truly in control of and how you can regain that control.
Without control you leave yourself vulnerable and are making it easy for someone else to mess things up for you and destroy your livelihood. Lets start with a few examples of how this can happen.
Relying on Products and Services
We all use products and services in our businesses. I’m using countless products and services simply to create and publish this article.
That’s fine, but we need to identify the products and services that we rely heavily on and we cannot do without. They’re the ones that can destroy our business overnight if they fail, are shutdown or simply don’t want us as a customer any more.
Here’s a good example, eBay. I’ve heard of people creating great eBay businesses, only for eBay to shut down their account overnight with no explanation. The result being the end of their business and and the end of their livelihood. No warning, no compensation, nothing.
As you might know I’m a big fan of Twitter but I’m well aware that they could suspend my account at any time. Again, no explanation is likely to be given and no compensation for the hundreds of hours I’ve spent building up a following. This has happenned to a lot of people I know.
Same goes for Facebook and a whole raft of other ‘great’ services we find on the internet.
That’s one of the reasons I always host my own websites and buy my own domain names. The free and easier alternative of using something like Worpress.com, Tumblr.com and HubPages.com to host our websites is best avoided.
If you build your Internet Business around one of those sites and they close your account it’s over. I use them occasionally for marketing but don’t rely on them anymore, not since one of them sent me an email one day saying my account had been deleted with no explanation.
We’re not talking suspended or even locked, it was deleted, everything gone with no chance of retrieving the data first.
My mistake? To relinquish control to someone else, trust them and not to be in full control myself.
Taking Responsibility Yourself
Unless we want all our hard work and indeed our entire businesses to be destroyed overnight by someone else then we need to take control and be responsible.
It’s easy for me to blame Google for trashing my website traffic overnight, but it was my fault for allowing them to do so. There’s no point blaming them if I allowed them to do it.
I knew about Google algorithm changes and I knew about potential Google penalties but I still left them in control, it was my fault.
The same applies when we outsource our legal and financial tasks to solicitors and accountants. If they screw up it’s easy to blame them but we’ll often find that it’s us who are still responsible. We have to pay the resulting overdue tax bill and fines, not them.
When we outsource anything we’re still ultimately responsible and we need to accept that and behave as such. We should use due diligence to make sure we really can trust the people we rely upon so heavily.
That’s why I’m a big believer in not having people run your business. Instead, Create Processes to run your business and people to execute those processes. That way, you’re less dependent on individuals, they’re more replaceable and you retain full control of the processes you created.
Protect Your Most Important Assets
Another, often forgotten aspect of being in control is protecting your important assets. It should be a part of your business mindset not just to Create and Collect Assets, but to protect them.
I’m no legal expert, but creating the right legal entities for your business, for example LLCs in the US and Ltd companies in the UK, can go a long way to protecting your personal assets if your business fails.
Depending on the nature of your business insurance may be a legal requirement but even if it’s not it’s well worth considering if it protects your most valuable assets.
Finally, backing up your important data. Too many people nowadays rely on electronic data but fail to back it up. It’s all very well being in control of your own data on your own PC, but when it’s accidentally deleted or corrupt that control is lost in an instant.
Those who do back up their data still sometimes keep the data on the same computer or on another storage device in the same building. Either fire or theft could easily wipe out both the original files and the backup. That’s why you should always keep your most important backups offsite.
I hope this article hasn’t scared you too much, but has achieved the goal I originally set out to achieve.
This was simply to make you think about any areas of your business where you aren’t really in control, then to think about how you might improve your level of control and further protect your livelihood.
Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment.
