The Balanced Life

There is a lot of talk about the flights that were cancelled and the chaos of the Crowdstrike tech outage. I was personally affected by it as my husband and I were returning home from an anniversary trip to Jamaica on July 21^st…but didn’t finally get home until July 24^th. Lots of talk is going on about what needs to be done, but is there anything we can learn for our own lives and business from it.

Absolutely.

Once we get beyond the frustration, blame, and stress of what happened, we can start to see how we can use this as an opportunity to run our businesses and lives better and how to try to prevent issues—and respond to customers when we fall short.

1. Prepare ourselves—Plan Ahead
2. Prepare our businesses—Build redundancy
3. Proactive in our solutions
4. Rebuild the trust

Prepare ourselves by Planning ahead

     This is something you should already be doing, but this makes it even more obvious now. We have developed a business landscape where we have a lean landscape and have just as many resources as we need in a perfect situation. Whether if this is the self-employed person running their business credit up to the limit or the large company trying to do more work with fewer people and relying heavily on technology, we seem to be obsessed with running our business for the best-case scenario which means when something goes wrong, it is really hard to absorb. When something goes VERY bad, the recovery can be devastating.

     So, look critically at how you run your business and life. Do you wait until you have virtually nothing in the house to eat before you start your grocery list? Do you have one staff member who is jack/jill of all trades that you rely on so heavily that if they missed 3 or 4 days unexpectedly you would have a hard time keeping up? Do you run your budget at 90%-95% of revenue/income and hope nothing goes wrong?

     That is the business equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck. As we saw with this one system, it can have catastrophic results. In fact, just a few days before the CrowdStrike thing on July 19 I got an email about a big announcement coming Monday, July 22 from Delta. Whatever that announcement was has now been overshadowed—and possibly eliminated—by this singular event.

     Could the same happen to you?

Build Redundancy

     This leads to my second point, building redundancy. This is a HUGE drum I beat to everyone I’ve ever coached. My other phrase, my kids get tired of hearing, is what Regan said, “Trust, but Verify”. The bottom line is, we have to try to avoid bottlenecks of any kind in our business. I feel one of Delta’s huge bottlenecks is trying to run everything through Atlanta [second only to JFK]. I go to the Caribbean twice a year: once for an annual mission trip, once for my anniversary. It is a nightmare every year because of ridiculous schedules going through Atlanta [for travel to Jamaica] or JFK/NY [for The Dominican Republic]. 3 of the last 4 years we’ve nearly missed our Atlanta connection going down or back—or both. 2 of the last 4 years they’ve misdirected one of our suitcases resulting in not getting our luggage until a day later.

     We live near the Detroit airport—a supposed Delta hub—but yet almost never have a direct flight anywhere. A blindspot that made this crowdstrike thing even worse. If we had waited to find a flight back home via Atlanta we would not have gotten home until Friday, instead of Wednesday. Others jumped on other airlines that went through other airports and were home the next day. It may seem more efficient to have a singular primary hub, but it blinds you to the reality of the chaos you cause yourself and your company with every domino that gets bumped.

     Now, in your own business, what singular system, person, or software do you rely on to do the bulk of things. What is the one linchpin, that if disturbed, could cause your entire business to fall apart? In your home, do you rely on a single person or circumstance or job for everything? If that one thing goes, so does your business?

     You need to build in redundancy. You need multiple streams of income—not a single job. You need a phone AND paper calendar. You need a generator if you lose power. You need extra people on your business team cross-trained and regularly participating in various areas in case one has to step away.

     Evaluate your systems in your life, family, job, business, and even parenting, so you are prepared for WHEN there will be a major disruption to your life and/or business, so you can keep going forward with minimal impact.

Proactive in Solutions and Rebuilding the trust

     On these last two points I feel Delta did pretty well—but weren’t quite as aggressive as they should have been initially. When the issue started, they said people could rebook, but they gave a limited timeframe. They kept moving it one day at a time until about 4 or 5 days in, they pushed it out about 2 weeks. If they’d initially allowed that much leeway, there may have been more breathing room in the system, but even with that, I want to give them some credit. They did a good job of trying to solve the problem, not do the minimum to get by.

     Now, look at your own business and life. How do you address the problems when they come in your business and life. If something goes wrong on a customer’s project, do you work harder to protect your honor or try to deliver the results?

     How do you build a consistently positive experience for your customer with your business? How do you work to build trust between yourself and your staff? In your personal relationships, do you work to create a strong bond—even when you are a parent saying no?

     I have had an exceptionally positive experience with Delta until the last few years with this Atlanta connection headache. It is starting to erode my positive view of them, but I am giving them another try because of the history we have. With the Sandals resort we also had issues that came about because of the hurricane that hit there the beginning of July, but because of past positive experiences I was willing to overlook it. The way they stepped in an helped when our flight was cancelled—they added to the trust jar we had created.

     Look for ways in your own relationships and businesses to build and establish long-term trust that will endure when something huge hits.

     As people continue to evaluate the ramifications of this issue at the various airlines, businesses, hospitals, and every other thing that was impacted, many will whine about the incident—the singular story they experienced. But as people trying to build businesses and live a life of Balance, I think we have a great opportunity to use this as an example of the impact to a business and industry when these critical things aren’t planned for well ahead of time. Look at your business and say, “If the worst possible thing that could happen to my customer DID happen, what would I do.” And also think what that would be and how to build in the redundancy, widen the bottlenecks, and build the trust, so even the worst is less bad than what it could be.

     I’ll see you on our next post, which starting in August, will be twice a month. The 2^nd and 4^th Mondays of each month. Share your feedback, share this post, and come back to www.TheBalancedLife.com for more content on building a life of heath, relational growth, and professional growth.