Transcript:

Just make sure that for your business and your personal life, you've got backups for the tech failures because when they happen they're never fun.

Hey there, it's Monica, happy Tuesday, November 20th, 2018 and I will share a little story with you. So when I was working at one of my old companies, we spent all night deploying the site that we had worked on for so long and it was just part of the site that we worked with and because of the architecture of the site- and I won't get super geeky on you, but you can architect websites in very different ways and this particular one had an infrastructure where like everything was in one big thing- and so when we deployed this part that needed to go live. We deployed it. It was like 6:00 AM. I finally got to go home. Like I was exhausted. We've been working on this thing like hour after hour after hour and it was a team. It wasn't just me, a lot of us.

And I go home, I crawl into bed and I'm like, “Oh, I get to sleep.” And then my phone rings, I look at it, it's my boss. “Hello.” He says, “Monica, we've taken down the entire site. You have to come back to work.” Okay, so I get up, go back to work. We do a ton of performance optimization because we didn't have time to performance tests before we went live with this thing. So in software development you normally run load testing and performance testing to make sure that these kinds of things don't happen. But guess what? Sometimes time runs out and you do a few shortcuts. So we took down our entire site. Our company was making zero money. It was an entire online site, no money being made. So yeah, you get back out of bed and you go. We fixed it and the site hobbled along kind of slowly for the next few days while we really, really fixed it.

And we learned then the power of having backups. So at that point we started a disaster recovery plan, which is for this kind of thing to happen, rollback plans, lots of things happened after this. And we also did what's called a postmortem. So on any project that you work on, you should do a postmortem and I'll talk about that in a different live. Actually, that's a good topic. The point is that's just one tech failure. If you have not had a tech failure yet, it's coming because tech always fails. It's not a matter of when your tech is going to fail or if it's gonna fail it's when because at some point your phone will die at some point your computer's going to die at some point your car is going to break, right? Every technical thing you use in your life fails.

And so there's a couple of ways that I do to deal with it. First is be ready for it. If your phone dies, this is a pretty simple one, but I know a lot of people don't do this, have someone's phone number memorized. I know nowadays, we don't memorize phone numbers. I can tell you I have like four people's phone numbers memorized, right? Critical phone numbers, preferably more than one. But I remember when I got married to my husband, I was like, “Hey honey, you need to need to memorize my phone number because if you lose your phone or if your phone dies and you don't know my number or how to get ahold of me, then I can't help you.” So that is one thing to do if your phone dies, but I'm talking more about business things.

So something that you should always do is be prepared to have your laptop or whatever computer system you're using, like dropped off the face of the planet and you still be okay. And one of the ways that I do that is by using Dropbox and it's a great system. I'm not sure if they still have a free model. I've been using it for a really long time, but at this point I pay them but I love them. So any of the files that are stored on my computer actually get uploaded to the cloud instantly and I don't have to worry about it. They also sync to my phone, so I love that because when I'm looking stuff up. If you're not using Dropbox, I highly, highly recommend it. And I'm not getting paid to say that by the way, this is not like a paid or sponsored video.

I'm just telling you guys the tools I use. The other thing is that I like to be well connected to people that could actually help me solve a problem. So I am super technical but I'm only one kind of geeky, right? In the world of computers and marketing and digital stuff, there's a lot of people that can do a lot of things because there's a lot of stuff happening, right? If you are primarily on Facebook and you run Facebook ads, you probably need to know a Facebook ads expert like in real life and you need to have their phone number, right? If you run a software company, you probably need your lead developer and a junior developer's phone numbers memorized because if the site's going down and you don't have a way to get hold of them, that's bad.

And you probably need a couple of these, so don't just expect your tech to work all the time. It's going to fail. It's a matter of when it's going to fail. And then have some backup systems in place. Have your files offsite. I see a lot of people too, they're like, “Oh my God, I've got it backed up on a hard drive and the hard drive was sitting right next to their computer.” Okay, what happens if your house catches on fire? And you know, this happened to my aunt. She was on a cruise in the Caribbean and I'm sitting there and it's like 1:00 in the morning and I get a phone call from my dad's girlfriend and she's like, “Your aunt's house is on fire.” I was like, “Wait, what?” And I'm four hours away- why am I getting a phone call?

And so I called my uncle who lives next door to my aunt and I'm like, “Is Donna's house on fire?” He's like, “It is.” And I was like, “What?” And like, “Your brother was staying there.” So then I have to figure it out. And then I'm calling my brother. This is all happening at 1:00 in the morning and then I call her daughters who are half an hour away to go up there. It was insanity, but she's on a cruise in the Caribbean so her computer is now kaput. Her house caught on fire. Hard drive backup sitting next to your computer. Not very good. Okay. So don't get caught in those kinds of situations. Backup to the cloud. Use Dropbox and have phone numbers of people who can help you. for the computer stuff.

For my aunt when she got her hustle back up together, my husband and I did a lot of stuff to get her tech stuffs set back up and things like that. So just make sure that for your business and your personal life, you've got backups for the tech failures because when they happen they're never fun. Alright, that is it for today. I would love to hear a story of your tech fail and how you recovered from it because there's so many of these great stories out there that I absolutely love because people get really crafty and ingenious when their tech fails. All right, have a good day.