Girl Friday, Gone Saturday

You're a new venture; you don't need a full disaster recovery plan. Frankly, if the wi-fi goes down for the morning, that's catastrophic enough. But if you do have a quiet few minutes, it wouldn't do any harm to consider the weaknesses you might have in your business, and to come up with some mitigation ideas.

Weaknesses come in many forms, but broadly it's either people/things you don't have that you're going to need, or people/things that you have that you can't do without.

Where are your break points?

Take the latter. You have a superstar working for you. Your customers love her. She knows the names of their children and where they went on holiday last summer. She shares the highs and lows of their family's lives.

She knows what they like to buy and how much they spend. If you need to plug a gap in sales - she will get it done.

But, surprisingly, she's both an asset to your company and a liability. An asset because she's doing such a great job; a liability because all your customers' eggs are in her basket. If she leaves your company, you're up the creek, paddle-less. It would take you ages to get set up again.

But even worse if she leaves and goes to your competitor, your business may not recover from the shock. So, in giving her that unique position, you're putting your business at risk.

What can you do?

• Make sure everything she knows about your customers is recorded somewhere. Maybe you can't yet afford a swanky-new CRM system, but you can create a shared document or a spreadsheet and she puts the information there. Every customer snippet she picks up goes into that document. You review it regularly and keep a backup for yourself.

  
  

  Remember, you have an obligation as a business to protect data of this nature.

  
  

• If you have the money and the incoming business to employ two people doing this job, so much the better. If one of them leaves it won't be such a disaster.

  
  

• In her contract of employment (yes, she needs to have one), there's a clause that says she cannot take information with her if she leaves. This can be in the Intellectual Property provision or in Post Employment Obligations. Clauses like this are notoriously difficult to police, but sometimes the threat of going after her is enough of a deterrent.

  
  

• Don't allow your employees to use their own laptops at work, as tempting as that might be. Similarly, don't allow them to set up personal What'sApp groups with customers on their phones.

  
  

• Know what's going on competitively. The more successful you are, the more people will be watching your progress and will want to steal your business and your employees. A healthy sense of paranoia is useful.

  
  

It's obviously not very nice being suspicious of your employees all the time, and I'm not suggesting you should creep about looking for evidence of wrongdoing. But just think what would happen if your competitor got hold of a list of your customers. It could be fatal. And the same is true with suppliers, partners, business methods and financial information.

Be vigilant.

Next Butt