Jim Edwards and Stew Smith discuss a Sales Copy and Content Marketing Hacks Facebook Group comment and question from a new member.
Today’s topic is disaster recovery or business continuity. What is your plan when you cannot work. Electrical failure, floods, dropped / broken equipment.
Do you have back up plans? Back up products? Can you turn a potential disaster into a minor inconvenience – because you were not complacent?
That is the key. We may not talk much about sales copy and content marketing in this podcast, but what do you do when you cannot get to work?
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Transcription
Jim Edwards: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here along with,
Stew Smith: Stew Smith
Jim Edwards: and welcome back to another edition of the Sales Copywriting And Content Marketing Hacks Podcast.
And this is episode 37?
Stew Smith: 38
Jim Edwards: 38?
Stew Smith: Yes,
Jim Edwards: Oh Wow…
Do you have a cool rhyme for that?
Stew Smith: No, I don’t…
We’re doing great as 38…
Stew Smith: There you go…
Jim Edwards: I thought that was such an easy setup…
Stew smith: It was, I don’t know…
I’m just being a smart Alec…
Jim Edwards: We’ve been reading my book for the last hour and Stew’s poor eyes or are glazing over…
But we are halfway through the audiobook/radio/podcast version of copywriting secrets…
Stew Smith: Yes…
We are turning this book into an audio file…
Jim Edwards: That’s right…
So and Stew is letting me be his personal reader of the book cause I don’t think he’s ready yet, even though
Stew Smith: I have not…
I am reading it while through your eyes.
Jim Edwards: I sent you a copy of this, right?
Stew Smith: I know, but it was weird…
Somebody I borrowed it…
Jim Edwards: Who borrowed it?
Stew Smith: Took it home…
Long Story…
Jim Edwards: Oh, okay…
All right…
Finally I’m gonna start giving away all your books too…
That’s all right…
Okay…
So today, what are we talking about?
We’re talking about are you ready for a disaster?
Are you prepped?
Are you a prepper?
Do you have enough rounds of ammunition?
Do you have enough freeze dried food?
Do you have enough batteries?
No, that is not the kind of prepping we’re talking about…
We are talking about disaster preparedness for the information marketer/e-comm seller/author/software developers/I can’t think of his speaker now…
Stew Smith: Business Continuity
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Business Continuity for the Solo entrepreneur…
Stew Smith: Right…
Jim Edwards: And it’s interesting because right now they’re talking about hurricane and next I love all the clickbait and stuff on the weather channel because they…
I mean this is some crazy stuff, but we go from hurricanes to tornadoes to superstorms to, Arctic blast to…
They named snow storms now.
And the thing is people think that a disaster is something that the news is going to give you a heads up on…
But that’s not the kind of disaster that can take out your business…
Cause you got enough warning that if one of those things takes out your business…
Well you pretty much just suck and aren’t paying attention…
So what I’m talking about are…
Well when you think of a disaster Stew, what do you think of?
Stew Smith: It can be anything from a busted water pipe, you know, that fills up your basement and you have a basement office…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: So what do you do?
Jim Edwards: Right… Yeah, it could be a lightening strike, which happened to me out a couple of weeks ago…
It could be a sudden thunderstorm that we’ve had stuff like that happen…
There’s nothing going on and you wake up in the middle of the night and you realize that a tornado has gone across the tops of the trees all around your house, which is kind of freaky.
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: It could be a freak flood…
It could be the pipes backing up in your house…
It could be somebody breaking into your house…
It could be dropping your phone…
I broke my phone, this phone died…
I keep it here as an example…
This phone died because I dropped it on the floor…
Literally I was using it and it was like boom…
Butterfingers…
The thing didn’t fall more than three feet and it breaked…
Stew Smith: MMM…
Jim Edwards: Right there…
Of course I didn’t have the coverage plan…
It could be a malware could be a virus…
It could be a bad component on your hard drive going out…
It could be a bad piece of RAM…
It could be a bad power adapter…
It could be all kinds of stuff that could go wrong that qualifies as a disaster and the sun is shining outside…
Can you think of any other that I didn’t mention?
Stew Smith: Oh, I mean, just think of things that cause hourly long headaches…
Yeah, like you put in a new piece of software and you can’t get it to work and you spend 12 hours trying to figure it out and dealing with customer service…
So it’s the things that just eat up your time being completely unproductive…
Jim Edwards: That’s a great point…
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: I just, I never even thought about that, but I’ve had that happen…
You install a new piece of software and it screws up everything…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: And you got no way to roll back…
You’re just like, if I could just uninstall this and make it go back to the way it was, my life would be so much better than it was three days ago…
Since the hell I’ve been through…
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: I’ve had that happen…
Which is another reason why…
If you’re a software developer or you test software or anything like that…
You should have a separate computer that you use to test software that your developers send you before…
We never install that stuff on your own computer…
I learned that the hard way…
Stew Smith: Good point…
Jim Edwards: And they’re not doing it maliciously…
It just, you know, shit happens.
So, that’s kind of the small list…
I had another list over here real quick…
Just to recap, lightning strike or power outage…
Dropping your phone on the floor or in the toilet…
Do you know anybody that’s dropped their phone in the toilets Stew.
Stew Smith: I have not…
I dropped it in the bathtub though.
Jim Edwards: I know someone that’s dropped in the toilet…
Yeah, they were standing there doing their business, looking at their phone and dropped it in the can.
Stolen computer or phone burst pipe in your ceiling that rains on your electronic spilled cup of coffee on your keyboard.
Think about this…
You’re on a plane, you’re sitting somewhere, somebody’s jostles your elbow just at the wrong time…
And Bam, life as you know, it has come to a stop.
So the thing is there’s all kinds of stuff that can happen to derail you or cripple you.
And you might be sitting there thinking,
“Why are you guys talking about this?
You’re supposed to be teaching me about creating content that motivates people to spend money with me…
or creating sales copy that is hypnotic and, and magical and makes people think that I’m wonderful and want to sign up for everything.”
And you know what, you can do all those things and if you lose your computer or you lose your business…
None of that’s going to make any difference because if anything, people will be buying from you and your computer will be hosed and you won’t be able to respond to them…
And all of a sudden they’re gonna hate you and they’re going to go on social media and say, I bought this two days ago…
No one delivered it and I can’t get a response…
And it’s a scam…
And within 72 hours, your entire livelihood has been washed down the toilet because you dropped your phone in the canned…
Way to go scooter!
Stew Smith: Yeah…
in the Seal teams we have a saying.
“Two is one and one is none.”
Jim Edwards: Yup…
And what does that mean?
Stew Smith: Just means you have to have backup.
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Stew Smith: You have to have a backup plan…
And you know, in our world, I would definitely say having a backup computer is where they’re at as a backup laptop that is, has all the files that you need that from your desktop or even have a backup…
But what I’ve done is I’ve replaced computers in the past that I just upgraded…
So I have an older computer is a little slower, but it could get the job done if I needed to…
And, and that since I have a basement office, everything’s up off the floor…
I like two to three feet up on tables…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: So if anything ever happened with a minor flood or whatever,
Hopefully it would catch it in time to be able to
Get all the stuff from flooding…
But then you also have now great backups and Dropbox the cloud, you know, whatever form of cloud you’re using…
But I definitely put everything up on Dropbox…
I use these little SD cards now…
That are in my computer and just make sure I have every written thing I’ve ever done on those things and I can just quickly pull them out and put them into a laptop and get rolling…
Jim Edwards: Right…
Stew Smith: If needed… So,
Jim Edwards: That’s the beauty of those SD cards now…
Especially the biggest one I’ve seen, they’re like nothing compared to, but I got a 128 gigabyte SD card…
That will hold everything I’ve ever done in worst case scenario is I come in here, pop the thing out of the little reader and stick it in a little thing, stick it in my pocket, put on my go bag and run…
Stew Smith: Yeah…I mean, think about it…
A fire for instance, you can’t grab everything out of your office…
Sometimes you just grab what’s important…
Jim Edwards: Right…
yeah, that’s what I do too…
I mean, I have everything on the little SD card…
I have everything on automatically backs up every single day…
Any new files to a SSD drive…
I recommended an SSD drive instead of a mechanical one.
Everything’s backed up to a third party place like Dropbox and so pretty much we’ve got it in fact, a lot of stuff I have on two different hard drives on my same computer.
So it’s one, two, three, four different places, all the same stuff…
Stew Smith: Same.
Jim Edwards: And I’m not worried about like Word or there’s a difference between data files and system files…
And that’s to me a system file is like Word or Acrobat or something like that…
I’m not worried about those because you can reinstall those anytime…
Data files or your word processing docs, your graphics, your spreadsheets…
All the stuff that you use in those files is what is important…
That’s the stuff that I’m backing up to be able to run out the door with if I ever have to…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
I’ve also backed up stores, like I have a store on Yahoo that I’ve had for 16 years now…
Jim Edwards: Yep…
Stew Smith: And I have a store on Shopify, you know, either one of those go up…
At least I have a backup, I can redirect people too and focus more on…
And hopefully in a couple of days the bigger companies will fix their system.
But you never know…
I mean, could get a a bug and the Yahoo store system and all the Yahoo stores go down and…
That’s happened…
Jim Edwards: Talk about your list too because I had that happen one time…
I had a list of 10,000 buyers that I was using a service called “Get Response” that is an autoresponder and mailing server…
So I would send, people would buy my book, they would sign up to Get Response, they would get the customer service email…
I had two years of followup emails built into that…
And then when I wanted to broadcast email to people, I would send through that one day it went down…
I had not backed up my list…
I lost 10,000 subscribers…
Stew Smith: Wow…
Jim Edwards: But, not just subscribers,
Stew Smith: Buyers,
Jim Edwards: Buyers,
Stew Smith: Customers…
Jim Edwards: That sucked…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: That went a long way towards crippling my business.
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Luckily I had a lot of those people were on other lists on a different server and that was not good…
That was not good at all…
But it taught me some stuff…
So we make sure that all of our data files from our websites are backed up off of the websites…
You can, it’s pretty easy to do now, especially depending on what systems you’re using…
But all the wizards are backed up…
All the data from the wizards are backed up and that’s, it’s just something you gotta be really, really careful of…
So in the end, disaster preparedness is really just making sure everything’s backed up…
Because a couple of weeks ago when we got struck by lightning, my computer got hurt…
And you might,
“Well, Jim, you had a big time unlimited power supply surge protector with a giant battery in it.
Jim Edwards: Yep…
I sure did…
But the surge protectors that my computer, by coming in through the cable in the yard, it came through the cable and then went through the cable through the cat cable into the adapter for the Internet…
So that’s how it came in…
And it fried a couple of my USB ports…
And then everything started kind of failing a little bit here, a little bit there…
And one day all my Webcam’s went out just before a webinar…
I was like, Oh crap…
So luckily I was able to get through the Webinar, but once the Webinar was over, I pulled out the new computer that had been sitting in a box for a couple of months next to my old one…
Cause I knew something was gonna happen…
I pulled out the computer and you know what’s Stew…
I had the new computer that I’m on right now, I had that thing up and running in two hours.
I had everything…
I was ready to start using it as if nothing had changed…
Stew Smith: Nice!
Jim Edwards: And the biggest pain in the ass of that whole process was the positioning of the fricking shift key…
Here…
Let me show you that shift key here is what’s causing me problems because this is there and it’s not as wide as it was on my old computer…
That’s the only bitch I have is the keyboard.
Stew Smith: You can just get a new keyboard…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: Or use the old one… Maybe the keyboard…
Jim Edwards: I don’t know…
But the point though is that it went from what could have been a major disaster became just a minor inconvenience because we were ready…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
That’s one is your disaster preparation or your business continuity plan…
If you can turn a disaster into a minor inconvenience, that’s a success…
Jim Edwards: Yes…
Stew Smith: Right…
I’m going to take it up a notch too…
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Stew Smith: All right…
So you know, we talk about, phones going down, we’ll think about phones, systems going down…
Alright, so now what your normal communication methods are out…
Right?
And you just can’t communicate the way you used to…
So one thing that we used to teach all the time is like when you can’t communicate, you also need to have a non-communication plan…
Meaning, how are you going to communicate with people that you normally communicate with in your life?
When you can’t, and this has nothing to do with business…
This is more about just, being able to meet your kids at a certain location at school…
Yeah…
If you couldn’t talk to them in time or you got to pick them up early, you know, you’re always going to meet right here by the flag pole, right.
Or whatever…
And if, you have people from neighboring towns that are all traveling and they can’t communicate or you’re going to meet?
You’re going to meet at the house, you’re going to meet at, somewhere else, depending on what happened.
And that you might need to meet somewhere out of town if you have a flood coming, right…
So non-communication plan is something that is a lot of fun to try to create…
cause it, you just throw a lot of what ifs in there and say,
“What if we can’t go to our house and we don’t have cell phone use?
I need to get in touch with my kids and my wife and where do we meet?”S
Jim Edwards: So, a little Timmy, I want you to pull that six inch concealed Gerber that I showed you to keep in your bag, even though there’s no weapons policy at school…
You sit outside by the flagpole…
If anyone says they’re from me and they don’t say Kermit pickled peppers, and if they don’t say Kermit pickled peppers, they are a creeper in a van, stab them, run back into the school and hide in the janitor’s closet…
I will be along.”
That kind of a thing?
Stew Smith: Yeah, absolutely…
Yeah…
Having a password for your kids…
Jim Edwards: Yeah, that’s important…
Maybe the kid shanking somebody isn’t a good idea, but should have a password…
I remember this is total off the wall thing, but my mom and dad did that for me when I was in kindergarten…
We had that and I don’t remember what the password was, but I remember it.
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: And my mom got delayed picking me up one day from school and I was out front, there was an adult there, there was a teacher there…
They didn’t leave me alone, but somebody pulled up and started trying to talk to me in front of the teacher and pulling some stuff…
And I basically said, what’s the password?
And the guy drove off…
Stew Smith: Wow…
Jim Edwards: And this is a five year old kid and this was in 1972 in San Francisco…
So anyway, that’s a real strategy…
Stew Smith: Yeah…Oh Wow…
We had one it’s definitely.
Jim Edwards: So, anyway, the big thing guys, the reason we bring this up is because it’s timely for today and it’s always timely that’s the big thing is that you never know what’s gonna happen.
And so you always have to be ready…
And if you’re always ready, then you don’t have to worry…
And that’s important…
So don’t let it take a national emergency to get you ready because then you’re ready for anything…
Anything else to add?
That was cool stuff about seal team “two is one and one is none,” I think I thought that was just guns…
Stew Smith: Just have back up,Yeah, just had backup…I think that’s the biggest key…
And while you see a storm coming your way…
Make sure you got everything backed up that you’ve worked on for the past month or two…
Jim Edwards: Well, and you know what, one other thing…
Be conscious of what’s going on because the storm that clipped us happened at three o’clock in the afternoon.
I’d become complacent when I lived in a trailer, when the first gray cloud appeared, we ran around and unplugged everything in the trailer but now…
I got a nice house and I got whole house surge protector…
I do, I have to whole house surge protectors wired into everything…
I’ve got these things, but you know what came right through the back door…
Literally through the cable…
Stew Smith: Yeah… My cable box got struck
Jim Edwards: And so now when the storms are coming, man, I got it set up so I’m not going to demonstrate cause you’ll lose you, but I mean I can go put the clip…
Look, I’ll show you… right there, all that stuff just unplugs all that stuff right there…
Just unplugs and the computer. It can’t get hurt by lightning…
Stew Smith: Nice…
Jim Edwards: Everything gets unplugged in a half a second…
Stew smith: Yup…
Jim Edwards: And then we’re good…
So just being conscious of stuff too…
Not, just sitting around going,
“Oh, I’m okay…”
If there’s a storm coming, I remember huge hurricane Isabel…
I covered every electronic in the house with a heavy duty glad bag…
Fortunately nothing happened, but if I’d had a leak…
That would have saved something from getting dripped on…
So just be conscious too, that helps…
Stew Smith: Complacency kills people…
Jim Edwards: There you go…
And that’s a navy seal telling you that and not just some chucklehead computer geek…
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