Entrepreneurs Need To Protect Their Assets

Tuesday, January 2, 2007 at 06:51pm by David Askaripour in Operations

As a boostrapping entrepreneur – in fact, as any sort of entrepreneur – you can’t afford not to protect your assets. If you’re an internet-based entrepreneur such as myself, your number one asset will be the information on your computer/server.

Minutes after going into the New Year while throwing a party in my New York City apartment, I tried turning on my laptop and noticed that it was completely dead. Upon further investigation, I noticed that someone spilled what appeared to be an entire alcoholic beverage over the keyboard.

It looked like the dude who spilled the drink tried to clean it off but by that time the damage was done and my baby was dead. All of my files, documents, images, code, etc… all possibly gone forever.

Yesterday I was able to pull out the hard drive and it appeared to be fine so let’s hope that I will be able to recover the information. As an intelligent entrepreneur I thought that I would be smart enough not to allow people to drink in my room during a New Year’s Eve party, but I guess that I still have a lot more learning to do.

I’ve always went to great lengths to backup my online information – so far as even paying for additional an service to backup all of my server files automatically. But I never thought to backup my local files. Jeezz… what a risk I took by not doing that.

As an entrepreneur, you have to think about the possibilities. The possibilities of things going wrong. You can never assume that your assets will be fully protected at all times so take all necessary steps to backup your files on external hard drives or by paying for a service to backup your entire computer online.

The few dollars you pay per month will be pennies compared to what can happen if all you data is destroyed, stolen, you fill in the blank.

Or to go a step further, get insurance! After telling one of my roommates about what happened to my computer, he immediately told me that I could have gotten “apartment insurance” that would have covered the cost of the computer.

I had no idea about apartment insurance and I definitely plan to get some coverage as soon as possible. He told me that I could insure anything: digital camera, ipod, TV, clothing, watches, etc… And it would cost me roughly $15 per month (which may vary, of course).

Now here I am typing this article on my friend’s mac (which I absolutely love, btw) and thinking about this valuable lesson that I learned. Don’t make the mistake that I did and please think about protecting your assets.

Whatever you have that’s valuable to your business, you need to safeguard it 24/7/365 – no excuses. Don’t get complacent and think that your belongings will always be nice and safe, always think about the “what-ifs.”

The extra time that you spend now to protect your assets will go a long way towards the growth of your business and not to mention the less headaches that you’ll be saved from. Oh, and if you’re going to party….keep everyone away from your room, will ya

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

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