Do you have a backup plan?

September 12, 2007

I got the unpleasant experience of having my cable, telephone and internet all shut off. Fun times. It turns out the automatic payment that I had set up online to make my life easier takes two months to go through. So what was meant to make my life easier turned out to be a pain in the butt. Is it obvious that I don’t read the fine print?

Also, having all of your vital services (cable tv barely qualifying as vital) linked to one company in order to save money can be a bit of a problem when you skip a bill. I couldn’t call them to pay my bill, since the phone was down and I couldn’t pay online because the Internet was gone.

Luckily, I live close enough to my parents that I could jet over there to get everything taken care of. If they had been out as well for some reason, I could have always hit the library for Internet access, I suppose.

Which brings me to the point of today’s post: Always have a backup plan. Sure, you may not have a silly cable company like I do that hides important information in tiny print. But you never know when something will go wrong while you’re working on a project.

I’m not a stickler for back up disks, but I always upload the project I’m working on to my web hosting account, just in case. I also have a couple of tried and true writers that I can outsource to, if need be.

I once took part in a long discussion on Warrior forum about writers, and how reliable they can or can’t be. A lot of marketers had experience with “all those writers” who had endless computer problems, or had internet connection problems, etc.

While these may have just been excuses for getting work in late, these things do happen. Last summer, my power cord died and thanks to having a random model of computer I had to wait a week and half (and pay $200) for a new one to arrive. Make sure your clients don’t find out about those happenstances unless absolutely necessary.

By setting up a back up plan in advance, you won’t have to scramble to find a solution. Network with a few other writers, make sure to back up your work and you’ll never have to be “one of those writers.”

Posted in Techniques and Tips, Client Relations