Greetings!
Happy Monday!
I read an article about the economy recently, which I thought was from the New York Times. But when I Googled around to find it, I found that lots of news sources are telling the same story:
People are worried about the economy even though they themselves are doing just fine.
This happens a lot, especially with the economy. But, at some level, we all realize that bad news might just mean that the pundits can't predict what will happen next. Jobs are growing faster than predicted. We guessed wrong about what The Fed or the ECB was going to do.
The fact that pundits, who are paid to speculate four hours a day, could not predict the future is not a good reason for you to worry about the economy.
I love to remind people that you are an economy of one. Yes, there will be some inflation. Yes, the price of gas will go up and down. Yes, a lot of the world is out of your control. But you already know that most of the world is out of your control. I just want to make sure you're also clear on this:
YOU and your company are also outside the control of the rest of the world. In other words, you control you. You control your company.
If you asked most people to tell you the inflation rate without looking it up, you'd find that people really, honestly don't know it. They know it's UP because someone said so on the radio. But is it 3% or 8% or 20%? And what's the difference, and what does it mean?
Look back at your past success. Was your business driven by the economic downturn in 2020? Did you know we had one? How about when the DOW dropped 3,000 points in the first quarter of 2018? Did that affect your daily business? Probably not. Did you even notice it? Probably not.
When I say you are an economy of one, I simply mean: Take care of YOUR business. You need one more client to have a good week. And then go get one more. Then one more.
Take care of your clients today and they'll be here tomorrow.
Keep marketing. You can't stop and start marketing. Ever. Really.
Love you employees. They'll take care of your business and your clients.
Be prudent with money, but don't make important changes (or cuts) based on what the news reports about how other people are doing!
Two Interesting - Maybe Even Weird - Facts about Recessions
Disclaimer: I don't think we're in a recession. But I'm not an economist, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Fact: Many great businesses are founded during a recession. How is this possible? Because they started out by paying attention to what was really going on in their lives and market and ignored the news.
Google businesses founded during a recession and you'll find these and more:
- Airbnb
- Electronic Arts
- General Electric
- Hewlett-Packard
- Hyatt Hotels
- Mailchimp
- Microsoft
- MTV
- Netflix
- Sports Illustrated
- Trader Joe's
- Uber
This only affects you in that it demonstrates that any business can flourish when the rest of the world is worried.
Fact: An economic downturn is a great opportunity to invest in your company. Again, there's lots of support for this one. I've written about this before: Investing in your own company is always a great way to improve the company and your service.
When others are afraid, it's a great time for you to be bold. My friend Amy Babinchak loves to point out that manufacturers often use economic downturns as an opportunity to buy new equipment on sale or to expand operations and jump ahead of the competition. So, when the economy improves, they are uncatchable.
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Everyone's circumstances are different. The point of this discussion is simply to look at your reality right now. Don't "think" yourself into a recession just because there's bad news on the podcasts. Take care of your clients, your employees, and your business.
Make a plan. Keep doing what's successful. And if you can invest in something that will improve your business, do so!
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Other notes, tidbits, and pieces of string . . .
Last week I told the tale of woe about my hosting service. Now, after a dozen years of great service, we are moving away from DreamHost. For 11.8 years, we had great service. But when things went bad, they just couldn't figure out how to fix it.
In the end, the customer service failure came down to the ultimate difference between customer service in a small business versus a large business: Taking ownership of the problem.
If one of your clients has a technical issue that is critical, intermittent, and hard to handle, you probably do one important thing: You assign the service manager or someone else to do anything and everything it takes to fix the problem. The client knows you've temporarily shifted into a single point of contact for that issue and they know this one person will do whatever it takes to fix it.
And you fix it! You might need to take drastic action. You might even spend some money. But you will fix the problem.
Big companies fail badly on this front. They don't have a process for breaking the glass on the emergency alert. They literally cannot have one person take over an issue and do whatever it takes to fix it.
And so we move on. We have set up four servers over at Cloudways using Linode hosting services. We are gradually moving domains based on how critical the sites are and the horsepower needed for each. We are moving all domains to Cloudflare, which makes zero downtime migration easier. (Plus it adds a layer of security.)
We believe the final service will be "overkill" for all domains. And that's fine. If a server chugs along using 15% of CPU capacity, that's fine with me.
We've moved about 100 domains so far. Of course, those were the easiest and smallest. We have about 35 domains left to go. Slow and steady wins the race.
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Calendar Updates - I've added a few items. Please remember to send me info if you hear about any in-person events in our space.
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Bitdefender had a big announcement last week:
MDR Foundations. See the
SMB Community Podcast for juicy details.
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You should join me at ChannelCon August 2-4. You can register for FREE, even if you can't attend in person. You'll get the links and downloads.
Then use the code CC22SmallBiz to register free.
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The NSITSP Election Kick-off meeting was last week. You can view the recording, transcripts, and chat notes at
https://nsitsp.org/meetings/.
