Keeping Your Office Up and Running

This morning at approximately 6:00 AM, sections of Toronto lost power for about 15 minutes.  These things happen, but they can be a pain if they happen during business hours and disrupt your business activities. 

One thing we have done to prevent downtime in the event of a power outage is we purchased a phone system that has a backup power supply.  Why?  Unless your phone system is remotely hosted (and most monthly residential call answer services are, but most in house phone systems are not), you lose your recorded greetings and your messages.  By having a back up power supply for you phone system, you can avoid having your greetings deleted – at least that is the theory. 

So, when the power went out this morning, I called the office to test the backup power supply.  Good news!  All our greetings and messages were intact.  At the end of the day, it’s a small but important thing, like so many other aspects of your business.   Just avoiding the hassle of scrambling to get greetings back on the system would have been a real pain this morning, so I’m glad we invested in the phone system we did.

There are a number of little things like investing in backup power that you can do to ensure your office stays up and running.  I was recently interviewed by the Toronto Star regarding office security safeguards.  In the article I describe how we purchase internet connectivity from two ISP’s and how this has spared us undue downtime.  With a little planning and a little foresight you can save your business from unnecessary headaches. 

I am going to write more about some little tricks like this in the coming weeks and months – I hope you find them useful.  And oh, by the way, as it turns out we need to re-record our phone system greetings anyway because they all still say 2ndSite and not FreshBooks…this detail has been nagging me for about a week now, but at least we don’t have to scramble to get it done .