A friend just asked me a question today, how much at risk am I during hurricane season given the fact that I am so close to the coast. Fact is, my home and my business is very much at risk. Every year when others are thinking of summer holidays, I think of emergency and disaster recovery. We have been very lucky for about 10 years now but that only lulls people into a false sense of security. Something I am always conscious of. You know what they say. It’s the calm before the storm so every year, at the back of my mind, I’m always preparing for the worst.

Photo by Kevin Finneran

You may not operate in a high risk area like I do, but, in the recent past we’ve had a lot of natural disaster all over the world. Some were totally unexpected and some were made worse as a result of apathy. They should be a sobering reminder to all of us that disaster does not always pick and choose who or where.

I am certainly not an insurance agent so you will do well to check with your agent before making any adjustments or addition to your policy. Here are some of the things that you should look into to prepare your business for disaster.

• Backup, then backup that backup and backup again.
• Keep a backup in your office/home and keep at least one backup off site too. This is one reason why I use services like Mozy because the backup is not located where I am. If I experience a total loss of my home (touch wood), I can always get my data from them.
• Discuss with your insurance agent what is a good protection plan for your business.
• Develop an emergency/evacuation plan for your family and decide ahead of time what you will bring and include some key items from your business.
• When you make an inventory of your home, include an inventory of the software that you run too. Very often the software installed on your computer(s) is worth many times more than your computer(s) itself.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but definitely a good place to start.

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week we’re Sparking an Idea About Enjoying a Business-Free Holiday

Alright I’m rather late for this week’s meme. This holiday weekend thing is really throwing me off. Or is it because my husband took a day off today and is off tomorrow. His holidays always mess me up because I try to make it a ‘policy’ to be off when he is too but I can’t keep you hanging today can I

When it comes to vacation I’m the worse person to give any kind of advise or tip because… I haven’t been on vacation since I had my firstborn and she’s rapidly approaching 8! Yikes! Seriously Lynette? Uh… yeah. Alright, I don’t consider myself having had any real vacation time. To me, vacation is a week at Disney world, a month roaming Europe or going on a walkabout in Australia. Sure, I had a 3 day weekend at my in-laws (uhm is that even a vacation? LOL) or a day trip to the beach since we are so close to it. So what new idea can I possibly share?

I’ll admit - nothing earth shattering. However, this is what I can tell you, these little 2-3 days away always go off without a hitch. You see, I am preparing my business, myself and my family to be away for 1-2 months a year. My mini stay-cations are a training ground to help me see if my processes and plans put in works. So far, they have.

One of the most eye opening things I learned from my friend Alice Seba is, automation does not always mean software. In fact much of the automation I’ve put in place is non-technical and very human. Absolutely, a team is one good place to begin with but if your team doesn’t know what to do or relies on you to tell them what to do every day or every week then they aren’t going to help you that much. You’ll still be ‘working’ everyday, unable to take off.

Some people call it a system, I just call it a standing order. CJ helps the customers daily, Kit works on adding stuff for my members every week, Libby bills the clients every month and Patrick keeps developing the software every week. All this happens automatically. I don’t breathe over their necks, I don’t give instructions every week. Many are repetitive work and some like Patrick’s work aren’t. For those, I make sure I give as detailed instructions as possible at the beginning of the project, come to a common understanding and only drop in once in a while. All these work orders are considered to be done every week/day/month depending on the task, indefinitely. Until I say stop.

That alone made a huge difference. There are still more standing orders to be given out. I’m going to think of more. But you know the fact is, this isn’t for me or for a vacation. The goal is to build a business that doesn’t revolve around me so when it comes time for me to exit or step down, it can stand on it’s own and perhaps bring in more value.

Oh and one more thing - Exercise your will power to stop checking those emails. If you have set up things to run automatically the sky won’t fall on your head after 2 hours away from your business. Yeah, I was surprised too

When you get a new computer, what do you do with your old one? Some of you use it as a secondary unit. Others may give it away or hand it down to the kids. But if you still have your old computer sitting there and not doing anything, did you know you can take the hard drive out, re-format it and you’ll have the beginnings of a brand new external drive?

The best thing is you don’t have to get super technical with all this either. Products like the Voyager S2 from NewerTech works just like a toaster. You plug the docking station into your computer - it has USB if you’re not familiar with all the geeky SATA plugs. Then insert your hard drive into the slot. You’ll be ready to start saving files onto the drive. You can use as many drives as you want (one at a time).

We’ve been using the external hard drive case method which is the same concept, just more physical tinkering and plugging for a long time. It really does work and the savings can be significant because hard drives are a whole lot cheaper to buy than all in one external hard drives. They are also a lot larger than USB drives ;-). The Voyager S2 starts at $59.99.

Some women like shoe shopping, my weakness (among many) is cool icons, shiny buttons and slick graphics that are so characteristic of the new and trendy web 2.0 styles. Alas! I am no designer. There is no design bone in me at all. Which is why I always jump with glee when I find cool online tools to help me whip up a nice graphic or icon in a jiffy.

Now, I don’t claim these tools are sufficient to fire your graphic designer. Far from it. Keep your designer at all costs - I know I do mine. Keeping them real close. But sometimes when you want a quick button or graphic just to fill a space or get the task done, these can be helpful.

FreshBadge - I so love this one. One of my first finds in fact. Love the badges. I’ve noticed once in a while it gets flaky on me.

Tabs Generator - very handy for web designers.

My Cool Button - pretty neat.

Quick Web Creations - not free Been quite useful to me.

Usually, I’m more protective over the originals than the PDF version because you can make a PDF version any time but not the DOC. Despite my best efforts, I have lost the original DOC before and it’s devastating especially when it’s a pretty large book or report. If you have the PDF then you may still be able to salvage our work.

Why only may? Because, a lot of the tools and methods to retrieve the content from a PDF depends on the security settings of the PDF. If you have locked down your PDF to disallow copying, many tools cannot get past that and if they did you’d still have to remember the password.

Assuming you have not locked your PDF, one of the easiest ways is to simply open the file in a PDF reader and click on Save As from the menu. This will extract a text only version of your work. If your document has a lot of fancy designs and images, you won’t be able to retrieve them using this method but if it’s mostly textual content this is probably better anyway to allow you to work from a fresh copy.

If you’d like something that resembles the final result more, you could try:

• PDFtoWord
• Koolwire
• Advanced PDF to Word Converter Free
• Zamzar

Keep in mind, you may not get an exact reproduction. In other words, don’t expect your original document. Some converters choke on the alignments and  images, overlapping them but hey, the idea is to salvage as much as you can so you can’t be too picky.

WordPress… what can I say. I love you? Yes, it’s a great publishing platform that I sometimes wish I could run my whole business on it. Thankfully, there are always talented developers who think along the same lines. Sadly, there aren’t that many plugins for business applications and I’m not talking about just shopping carts here, but other things that go into managing a business. Here are some I found that could have potential to be really helpful for a small business owner.

WP-Invoice - I’ve been wondering when something like this would be developed. Lately, I’ve outgrown my invoicing solution and looking elsewhere but I really don’t want to install another stand alone application on my site - too many software to keep track of. Having the invoicing solution directly on an existing website makes the whole business a lot more centralized and less technical management too. Best of all this is developed by a couple of U.S. Marine Corp Veterans whom I’ll always be partial to. Am definitely trying this one.

Event Registration - We use this at MomMasterminds to organize our MMWeetups (Meetups). Allows us to post which event is upcoming and let’s people register so we know who’s coming and what to prepare. I think it might be useful for arranging meetings too.

WordPress Advanced Ticketing System - so far, this is the only ticket system I see. It’s still quite new so I’ll reserve judgement on it.

Job Board - I’ve always told people that many plugins they use could be unnecessary because with a little bit of simple coding and thinking outside the box, you’ll be able to achieve the same thing without a plugin on WordPress. That’s the beauty of the system. Well this is not a plugin but a good tutorial that shows you how to create a job listing/board.

WP-Project - this plugin is getting old. I’ve talked to Nick the developer, at this point in time he’s not able to devote time to it. But it might be something you could check out in a sandbox to see if it suits you.

Blog Goals Monitor - very interesting indeed! Keeping a blog can be hard work and sometimes you need a little help motivating ourselves or seeing whether we are achieving our goals. This plugin helps you do just that.

Like this post? I blog a lot about WordPress at my blog too. Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for more tech hints and specials while you’re there.

We’ve both read David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. We like to find ways to be more organized and efficient. Tools for improving our productivity intrigue us.

He has a cult-like following. His raving fans love his system. The essence of the system is to “do it, delegate it or defer it.”

The gtdagenda.com is all about using the system on the computer instead of paper. There is also integration in the system to receive email notifications each morning for calendar, next actions and/or your vision wall. (more…)

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week we’re Sparking an Idea that about Email

It all starts when you have one web site and one product. Then, when you build another site or another product (or blog) with it’s own domain you think well, maybe we need to create a new address on this new domain for customer support, for you, for the mailing list for… whatever. Then you add a new domain to your empire and you create another email address or *gasp* several addresses. Uh huh. That was me 2 years ago. (more…)

What’s the best way to find and contact key business professionals in a particular company or industry? Well, I guess you can go the LinkedIn route and see if any of your contacts would introduce you to them. Or, you could try Jigsaw.

Jigsaw is at heart, a business directory. It lists key people in different positions throughout an organization. You can search for contacts by geographical area, company or industry. You can also list yourself.

I can see how it can be useful, apart from the more obvious - sales leads generation, it could be used for sourcing or maybe to pitch an idea or simply initiate contact.

Alright, le’ts get straight to the point here, I know you all are waiting Here are the results of the video editor software giveaway.

Arika - Honestech Video Editor 8.0

Tatiana - Honestech Easy Video Editor 3.0

Congratulations! I’ll pass your information along. We’ll be in touch to for your mailing address. Thank you everyone for participating. If you didn’t win, you might want to hang around here. I am working on a really good software giveaway that is very practical and something every service provider could use. That’s all I’m going to say at the moment.