I want you to think about running your business like you’d think about climbing a frozen waterfall.
It’s not likely the first analogy you’d jump to.
But stay with me here.
Ice climbing is cool. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)
Frozen waterfalls especially so.
But this activity, which is a particular passion of mine, tends to be fraught with pitfalls for the unwary: like falling ice, sharp axes (I put one through my lip once), pointy crampons, lacerations related to pointy crampons, frostbite and hypothermia.
Then there’s this thing called a single point of failure.
When you’re anchored into the ice, you want to be sure that you’re anchored by more than one ice screw. Because, if you’re anchored into the frozen waterfall by just one screw, and that screw fails, well, then you’re kinda screwed. If you catch my drift.
So the principle: Never, ever have a single point of failure in your system.
True in ice climbing.
True in business too.
It was a beautiful summer day. (Not ice climbing season.) I was in a beautiful, boutique hotel, on a main thoroughfare, in a well-traveled resort town, broadcasting a webinar to an audience of about 600.
Suddenly the internet dropped out. And the power.
A construction crew out front, doing sidewalk work, accidentally cut the power main.
Luckily, I had a back up roaming router, and a power pack. Voila, back online.
Now we travel with the roaming router, a satellite router, a power pack and a solar panel.
Because our business depends on it.
Across our business, we are constantly assessing for and protecting against single points of failure: in team, tech, communication, systems, and processes.
My invitation to you: Where are you vulnerable in your business? Where are you dependent on a single person or system or piece of technology? What backup can you create? What can you do right now to protect against that point of failure?
Single points of failure can be fatal in climbing.
They certainly can leave you battered and bruised in biz.
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