An Important Business Lesson From a Cooker


Broken cookerIs your online business hiding an Achilles’ Heel? A weakness buried deep in its setup that can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt?

I’m asking because after 16 years of loyal service our cooker finally died this week. In all that time we only had to replace one oven thermostat.

You’d think it was sturdy and reliable. Yet it was built around a fundamental flaw.

One of its features was a versatile timer. It could sound an alarm after a selected period of time, it could also switch the oven off at this time and it could even switch the oven on and off at preset times to cook stuff while we were out. Yet it was this level of control that was the problem.

The passing years finally took their toll and the timer stopped working. And because the two parts of the cooker were so intimately connected so did the oven.

So this small, crucial and, after 16 years, obsolete component means we have to replace a machine that is still more than 95% in good working order. Crazy.

So it started me thinking: is there any small component in my online business that could bring the whole thing down? Is there such a hidden weakness in yours?

Perhaps it’s how rarely you backup your hard drive; or the autoresponder you use. Perhaps it’s who you use to create product images or you’re overly reliant on the people you promote as an affiliate.

Just in case, it’s an idea to take a look at your business now and again, think up some worst case scenarios and see if there’s room for improvement. It could just keep hot meals on your table.


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