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25
Apr
I’ve owned my own business for the last 10 years.
What I’ve learned over the years is that when I was struggling and hurting I had a lot of friends, however now that I’ve started getting my head above water they’ve become jealous and many would go out of their way to see me fall. They see me and my family buying new clothes, new cars, a new house but what they don’t see is the sweat, tears, blood and hard work that has been poured into this business year after year.
So…let me tell you about my Easter weekend.
First off…I understand that we don’t take near the number of holidays the government would like us to take. I know it is important to take a couple days off from work now and again, so I have no problem giving as many holidays as we can afford to give, and some we can’t afford to give.
It’s the reason that I gave everyone Thursday and Friday off for Easter. However, Thursday morning I woke up and went to work like normal. That is until the phone rang and I found out that one of my employees had totally deleted one of my customers websites and to make it worse it wasn’t even a website we were working on, or for that fact had ever worked on.
Making a backup copy before deleting a website is like web design 101. Heck they should make that mandatory, before giving you a computer. You always, always, always make a copy of anything before you delete it. Not only did we not make a copy of that website but for reason unknown to the rest of the world we totally deleted and removed it from the server, and replaced it with an under construction website. If you’re uploading an index page there is absolutely no reason to delete the whole website.
Anyway I spent my weekend calling hosting companies, web design companies, and anyone else I could think of that might have a copy of that website. I luckily found a copy of the website and was able to get it back online. However, at this moment I feel like I can never give anyone FTP access again because I don’t know what they might do with it.
But don’t think that was the only thing I did this weekend, you see knowing everyone else is off means I have to work twice as hard so we don’t fall behind. So I completely redesigned one website relating to dogs, and converted another website into a blog, and worked on the content management system for another lady as well as answered emails and the telephones.
There was a third website I was going to convert into a CMS but the office never sent me the information, so I was unable to do that one. This weekend was the first time in a couple months that I felt like we made some headway but I also see that I need to spend a lot more time in production. The problem with this is that it limits me from the other things I’m supposed to be doing like marking, selling, figuring out new and better ways for us to make money and running the business.
Hopefully it’s just a temporary setback and we can get things organized and set up so I don’t have to do it fulltime. In the last 10 years I’ve gone days without sleep, have eaten breakfast lunch and dinner in front of my computer, I’ve cried, gotten angry, and thrown stuff around the room but in the end I did what it took to get the business where it is today and God willing I will continue to do what it takes to build the business into so much more than it currently is.
Next time you see someone driving a new car or building a new house keep in mind that they have most likely given up TV, movies and time with the family to work their ass of in order to live their dreams and the only difference between you and them is the willingness to work a little harder and give up some of the pleasures in life. So… don’t be jealous of them, be upset at yourself.
Tags: Website Design Businessone
