Natural disasters tend to need backup plans!

It's no secret that natural disasters (any kind of them by the way) should all have one thing in common, a backup plan, because, well, you're dealing with something unpredictable--nature. Being confident in your goals should not prevent you from contingencies...life isn't so two-dimensional. A brilliant friend of the family started his company from his garage in 2004 and within 6 months he’d outgrown it, forcing him to lease an office space close to home, which at the time was in Broward County, Florida. His one man operation turned into a forty man operation in less than 2 years. You could say that he was on the fast track to success, in a beautiful high-rise building in Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately Bill’s company didn’t have a BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) plan, this three letter acronym that every managed IT services provider knows so well. In October 2005, South Florida was hit by Hurricane Wilma, the most damaging storm to hit Broward County since Hurricane King in 1950, and Wilma destroyed residential and commercial property in its path. Bill’s office building suffered tremendous damage and because they didn’t have any offsite backup, they lost everything.

I was in college, living paycheck to paycheck, eating Ramen Noodles and buying all non-brand name products.  So outsourcing any type of service wasn't really an option for me. It wasn’t a choice, it was reality and it was the way it had to be. I was living on a budget so that one day I could enjoy the finer things in life. My beautiful college girlfriend (who by the way is now my beautiful wife) nagged and nagged about the color of our walls until one day I decided I’d just paint them myself. I couldn’t afford to outsource the paint job. How hard could it be? I went to the local paint store, bought the cheapest brand of paint I could find, came home threw on some coveralls and began to paint.  Close to 2 weeks later, I was done. I stood in front of those walls and I knew deep down I’d done a crap job! I knew that it would have looked a thousand times better if I had outsourced the job to the professionals. But the cost was right and that was that.