Is Your Business Coffee-Proof?

We’ve talked about equipment and insurance. You may need equipment to create your deliverables. And that equipment might be insured for theft, breaks, and accidents. But that only means they’ll cut you a check for a new laptop. The projects on that hard-drive might be gone. Those photos copied to your desktop. The email draft with all the addresses you needed. Insurance can’t bring any of that back.

So how do you coffee-proof your business? With the cloud.

By the end of this module, you should be able to throw your laptop into the Grand Canyon, buy a new one, type in three passwords, and be back to exactly where you were. Your computer is a tool to help you work. If you make any tool irreplaceable, you’re making yourself very vulnerable.

So we’ll walk through the three places to setup accounts to make sure you never lose a step.

If you work with LARGE files (1GB or more) we’ll talk about those in the next module. Video projects, massive design projects, photo libraries, etc. We’ll deal with those next.

The other thing we’ll talk about in this module is how to approach each of these three data places to make everything faster, more consistent, and easier to find as you grow and collect communication, clients, and actual work.

Email

The first thing you should do is setup an email address for your business that’s different from your personal email. It’s not about “looking professional” it’s about organization and letting you maintain some work life balance. I do not check my work email when I’m on vacation. I can click a button in my settings to turn it off for as long as I want.

I won’t tell you which email provider to use. I’ve used Google Mail and Apple iCloud Mail over the years and they’re both good. You may have something else you love. You don’t have to customize your domain to be [email protected], but it’s better to do that now than wait a year and have your email address change.

Once you have your account created, do three things:

1) Set your delete button to ARCHIVE messages instead of deleting them.

Archiving a message makes it disappear, but you’ll always be able to find it later. Deleting a messages makes it go away forever. Maybe you have 30 days or something, but emails don’t take up enough room to worry about having to delete them. Save everything, you’ll be glad you did one day.

2) Learn how to search your mailboxes.

Gmail and Apple both have robust search functions. You can find messages to or from specific people or domains. You can search for things you said in the body of the email. You can search for attachments within a certain date range. So many things. Since you’ll be keeping all your emails forever, learn how to quickly go through them and find what you need.

3) Setup a few folders anyway.

Even though you’ve taught yourself to be a search bar wizard, having one click access to all of your correspondence with certain clients can be a huge time saver. You can even setup rules that automatically move emails from certain people to certain folders. Don’t be afraid to set up a rule once that will save you 25 clicks/week. Those add up.

Email is the easiest thing to be “backed up” because most are cloud based services. So typing in your account on another computer is simple. We’re going to do the same thing with files next.

Files

Email was easy. Files seem a little more complicated, but they’re not. It only takes two steps to get it right:

1) Sign up for a cloud storage solution. iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever.

Make sure it has the ability to function as a standalone service on your computer. You don’t want to have to open up a web browser every time you have a word doc sent to you.

2) Download whatever app they have so that it’s just another folder on your computer.

You want to be able to use the folders as native storage on your computer that is also synced to the cloud. This does two things: It keeps everything backed up AND it lets you keep stuff in the cloud that’s NOT saved to your desktop so your hard-drive doesn’t fill up.

A little discipline as you get started will make a habit that can save your business. You can even make your desktop sync to the cloud. Do it. You should never have a file that you need live in a space on your computer that isn’t redundantly backed up to the cloud. Because it makes everything easier to share AND if your laptop gets dropped in the Grand Canyon, you can just log in and pickup where you left off.

Notes

You may live mostly in your email and some documents here and there. Learning how to use a notes app from the beginning will make your business run a lot smoother as you grow. Apple Notes, Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep, whatever. Find a system that will allow you to take notes and save scraps of anything, in the cloud.

When you’re on the phone with a client, open up a note with today’s date, type the client name, and take a few notes about what you talk about. What your next steps are. Then you can quickly return to those notes when you need them. You can search notes just like you search your email. But you don’t want to email yourself every time you have a phone call.

Make sure it’s a service that you can effortlessly take notes on any of your devices. The point of a notes app is to be able to capture anything so you don’t have to remember it. If you’re out and about and want to look up a note on your phone before you go into a meeting, you can! If you want to save an article, or even some photos or an audio clip, a notes app will let you do that.

It also is the final place to store client info that if your computer crashes, you can recover with one login.

In Summary

Be thoughtful about where you communicate and store that communication. Put it in a place that’s easy to record to, easy to access, easy to search, and completely backed up. Cutting one of these corners now could mean some serious headaches in the future.