CITY WIDE BLACKOUT
It took a city wide blackout for our company to realize that an emergency backup power source would be a good thing to have. I’ve told them on numerous occasions that we need something to at least keep the system’s server operational during a power outage, but that it would really be advisable to have the whole building powered while the main source was out. We have customers all over the world and a generator could keep us operational and still capable of servicing and providing support to our customers even during a power outage. Our industry is very competitive; a power outage that lasted a few hours during a busy time could force some of our customers to seek products and services from a competitor – that could cause crippling damage to our company. To be successful in this business, we need to be available and operational whenever the customer needs us, whether it’s daytime, nighttime or during a storm that knocks out the electricity. We had luck in the past of never having had anything like this affect us in any way, but in the weeks after the outage we noticed a marked drop in sales volume – it was all due to the fact that we couldn’t deliver during the outage and our competition could. Luckily we’ve managed to recoup some of the business, but we certainly can’t let anything like that happen again.