hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting welcome back to our Saturday slowdown where I like to
remind everybody to work on their business and not just in their business
all right today I'm gonna give you six ways to protect your business I decided
on this topic because I'm going through some like life changes this year like my
son just went off to college my daughter's starting high school in just
a couple of months Scott and our daughter and I will all be venturing to
New Zealand and Australia for five months and our company leveled up it
reached like this new level that we've been kind of hoping to hit for a while
now and basically we just has we wanted to take stock of our personal lives our
professional lives make sure like everything we care about is protected
make sure kids are protected make sure business is protected our employees are
protected and all of that so as I was going through and taken stock of my life
and business and everything else I was realizing that protecting the business
really has a lot to do with making your business stable and healthy so if the
things that you would do for that are kind of the same things that you should
be doing when you're talking about protecting your business so here are
some of the steps that we've taken a revisited over the past year as we're
getting ready for all these changes in our lives and stuff the first one is
build an emergency fund so just like you would in your personal life you know
have three to six months of cold hard cash that's that's available for you
even if you don't need it a it feels good to know that you've got cash in the
bank if an emergency comes up but also if something sparks your interest if you
want to take your business in a new direction or something like that you
don't have to worry about whether or not you're going to get a loan your books
are gonna look so much better if you do get a loan and you go the bank you're
like I need a loan I've got all this cash but you know I don't want to spend
it I want to keep it for my emergency fund that they will be happy to loan you
money if you you you've got some cash in your books so I think that sometimes
that may be easier said than done if you don't know where to start if you're
living paycheck to paycheck or you know waiting for your clients money to come
in or whatever just read a couple of books simple profits
simple numbers wait simple numbers straight talk big profits by Greg
Crabtree I talk about it all the time I forgot what it was for a second all
right and then also checkout profit first by
Mike McCalla whit's those are two great books to get you started on building
your emergency fund just getting the structure in place so that your business
is healthy and happy my second tip is to load up on insurance so we just took out
a couple of key man life insurance policies so if something happens to me
and Scott the business is going to get some money so that they can have the the
wherewithal to either pay somebody to come in and help sell the business or
run the business or whatever make sure that you have your normal insurance that
you would always have business operating policy they're cheap and critical to
your business if you're an e-commerce seller you want to get insurance that
maybe protects your inventory what's when it's in transit if you're an
accountant errors and omissions just you know talk to an insurance agent and get
the insurance you need to make sure that what you do have is being protected tip
number three pull yourself out of the business even if you love working in
your business you need to teach your business how to run without you because
if your business is too reliant on you if something happens to you the business
is going to crash and burn so you need to make sure that you are using
automation where you can that you have things standardized systematize
documented all your processes are documented if you haven't already read
the book the e-myth revisited go read that book I think it's really critical
to have standardization in your company and make sure that other people are
cross-trained so that you're not the only one who knows how to do things and
and you're the only one who knows how to keep the wheels on the bus identify
critical points of failure in your business like if you were to come out of
the business and you know one particular process is going to just
totally unravel that's where you need to focus on first so go through identify
all the critical points in your business and work from the most important ones
down until you're like totally kind of obsolete and then cross train the heck
out of your team make sure everybody knows what to do so if somebody like you
know God forbid goes on vacation somebody else can fill in for them so
just make sure that the business isn't going to fail when you're that when
you're not there tip number four is take advantage of the
cloud the cloud is here it's got great security I know that there's like
hacking and stuff but we'll talk about that in a second but as long as you take
appropriate precautions the benefits far outweigh the risks so just move your
stuff to the cloud storage is cheaper up there I my heart goes out to all the
people who were affected by Hurricane Michael or any of these hurricanes that
have been just smashing into our country over the past couple of years like you
know there are fires going on everything else I know some people back in like
2012 I think there was a big fire in Colorado maybe was 2013 one of those I
was reading about a family who lost their house and they had their business
in their house and the fire came through and poof it's all gone and I was just
like no you could have had everything in the cloud like I have a client actually
who lives in Florida and they got hit by a hurricane last year and he was just
like thank God I had everything in the cloud like they hardly skipped a beat
take advantage of the fact that we have alternatives now where we can save
things in the cloud and we can protect our business that way tip number five
pay attention to security don't like keep a piece of paper underneath your
keyboard with your password let me in 1 2 3 on it like come on people
they've got tools like LastPass which is a password vault you can have all kinds
of secure passwords and things that allows you to get into your systems with
too much brain damage but it keeps things secure and you can share
information with other people securely like just you know be smart about your
passwords also when you're sharing access with other people make sure you
use sub logins like we our clients they'll let's use Chase for example
Chase has sub logins so if we want access to somebody's Chase account they
don't give us their password they set up a sub login with our own access which is
limited so that we don't have the ability to transact on their bank
account we can just go in see what we need to do do what we need to do but we
don't have to like put their company at risk so just make sure you're using sub
logins wherever you can and just be smart about how you're sharing
information and tip number six create a succession plan think about what's gonna
happen like if you get hit by a bus what do you want to have happen to your
business do you want to pass it on to your your progeny do you want to have it
be sold who do you want to be in charge of running it when you're gone like just
kind of think about all those things and then go talk to an attorney and get it
written down so that if something happens people don't have to guess what
you would have wanted to have happen to your business just lay out a plan and
give them as much specific information as possible we literally hope we have a
hit by a bus document so we've got like step by step instructions about how to
get to all the different things that they need to get to to keep the wheels
on the bus for the business not to mention the fact that our people are
super well trained and there's like cross-training and and I'm pretty
confident that things are going to be okay if anything ever happens to scatter
me so these are just some tips and things that we've been working through
and thinking about we aren't even actually totally done there we still
have a long list of stuff that we've identified that we need to take care of
but if you take care of these six things I think you're you're far and away ahead
of many of your peers in protecting your business so I
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