Accounting Systems

What is your most important business asset? When I asked that question many business owners they give me a long list of stuff they own a like inventory, furniture, Â buildings and more.

If they don’t think of hard assets they  think of soft assets like the most important asset in my business is my employees, or the most important asset in my business is the service I provide. While all of those items are assets they’re not the most important asset in your business.

This is a fundamental Start A Business Backwards strategy and lesson, the most important asset in any business is a list of customers that have bought your products or services.  the list of people that bought from you is your most important asset.

Thin about it, these people thought enough about your product or service to pay you. You built their trust and confidence in your business to the point where they paid you for your product. They are your lifeblood. So my question is how do you treat them. Are you a quickly or are you dating.

No Business is Immune to Bad Launch Decisions. My friend owns a very successful 20 years old design studio. The business has been very successful and my friend has done very well. A few months ago my friend decided to launch a new service and this is a classic case study of how not to launch a new product or service.

My friend had been reading about how technology was helping business find new customers and grow business and how the Internet was providing tremendous growth, my friend decide he wanted in on the action. My friend has always regretted not getting in on the first Internet boom (he forgot about the bust) so when he read about Web 2.0 and how the Internet was booming again so he decided to launch a new division to his existing business based solely on what he read in the news.

My friend launched his new service without doing any of the important work that could have made his new service an instant hit. Instead after more than 6 months the new service is STILL STRUGGLING to find its place in the market and he is still trying to find his place in the market. DO YOUR HOMEWORK

I messed up, thats what happened. Here is a lesson in blog maintenance. A few weeks ago in my infinite wisdom I decided to oupgrade the site to a newer version of WordPress. After the upgrade I wasn’t able to login. What a pain (the problem was caused by me). Anyhow, since I was in a hurry, I re-installed WordPress (complete new installation) and that killed the link to the old database. Long story short, since I gave the new database a new name (so I have the old posts) all of the content is in the old database and I have to transfer it to the new one.

Here are the lessons;

1. Backup, Backup, Backup – install a WordPress backup plugin and use it regularly. Otherwise you could lose all of your data
2. Do change the way stuff was done in the past. Normally I do all of my upgrades using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, this last time I didn’t and that hurt.
3. Search to see if there are issues with an upgrade BEFORE you upgrade. Didn’t do that and in hind sight there was an issue. Had I searched for problems first I could have put off doing the upgrade.

Thats it for now, but boy what a lesson. Even an experienced web guy has issues sometimes mostly by taking stuff for granted. Learn from my mistakes