Well, its been a week and half since my business experienced a HUGE business disaster. After having experienced many problems with my hosting company in July — all of my sites were offline for a week in July and my email didn’t work for two weeks. Trying to resolve the whole mess while on vacation was a real drag. My hosting company NEVER responded to a phone all or email or support ticket. So, when they finally popped back up and I was home again I decided to move the entire operation — over 16 sites in total. Well, I made mistakes. I didn’t get my backups right away.
I did a backup and didn’t download it right to my computer as soon as it was ready. I moved to the next site and started the backup.
Well, what happened in the long run was in setting up new hosting and trying to migrate everything from one host to another my original host deleted my entire account. I have been absolutely sick. I lost everything. With older backups I was able to get my main sites back online. I lost my entire list of 10,000 subscribers. I am still working to recover that but so far haven’t been able to.
Lessons learned:
Back Up Regularly and store your own backups.
Even though my host said they had weekly backups, when it came down to it the back up they were able to provide to me was over one year old and they thought I should be thankful that they had a back up.
I am considering moving some sites to different hosting companies. I used to do this but last year moved everything onto one host. If I had left things dispersed I would have not lost it all.
So what good is coming out of it all?
I have taken time to reflect on what my priorities are. What do I want my business to look like? With the destruction that occurred it was time to really take a look at things.
I redid my Best Year Yet plan. I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at a BIG meeting here in New Jersey. I spoke on goal setting and it made me look at my own vision and goals. It all comes back down to the basics. Vision, values, goals — all the things we talk about in strategic planning with Best Year Yet.
I looked at what went well and what my disappointments were and are. And took all of that to develop my significant life lessons for the upcoming year.
I love the Best Year Yet planning system because it is so on target and gets right down to it.
There is always good that emerges from disaster. Its not why the disaster happens but is an outcome, often unexpected. But we have to turn things around.
So, I am moving forward with Compass Rose Consulting — a revised vision, a new plan and new initiatives and focuses.
I look forward to sharing them with you over the next few days and weeks.
If you want to join me for a Best Year Yet planning session yourself. I invite you to take a look at the opportunity to just that in early September.
Business Success Coach, Donna Price, works with business leaders and their teams to strategically improve their business results. Using proven processes and ongoing follow up and coaching Price has a track record of supporting business owners in creating and living their vision. As a leadership consultant Donna works with leaders and teams to assess current status and then create solutions to improve leadership skills and team functioning. Donna is also a published author, having released her first book: "Launching Your Dream" in 2006. She also wrote and developed "Bizology.Biz: A Business Success System" and has that in both published version or via a membership. Donna is an expert in facilitation, group process and leadership as well as marketing and Internet Marketing.
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