Small Business and Home Based Business Survival
I’ve just been reading a very interesting piece about bank fraud and how it almost brought the British banking system to it’s knees. If you want to read something really scary you will find it here.
While the article didn’t have a lot to do directly with small business and home based business survival I did find an interesting reference buried in it that does have a lot of relevance for us.
What is your MTBU?
What is your maximum time to belly up?
That is a term that was coined Donn Parker of the Stanford Research Institute. He found that a business that relied on computers for their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailabe or unusable for a period of time.
But it seems to me that any small business or home based business is vulnerable in many areas and it would be prudent for us to be able to identify those areas tat affect our particualr and establish a MTBU.
Why do we need to do that?
Because when something goes wrong we then know just how important that particular problem is to our business and hopefully we will have some contingency plans in place to deal with that problem.
Those problems don’t only apply to computers either. What’s you’re MTBU if several of your clients fail to pay you on time? What’s you’re MTBU if you should fall ill? What’s your MTBU if a major piece of equipment should fail?
Those are just a few of the things that you should be looking at.
