For years my passion has been small business and entrepreneurship. I have always admired the business owners / farmers / self-employed who have taken great risks to grow a business while supporting a family and maintaining as sane of a lifestyle as possible. For those of you that are business owners or have worked closely with one, you understand that although you may be able to take off on a Tuesday afternoon to enjoy one of your passions but then you also may get a call at 1 AM because your client / customer needs you right then and there and beings each and every customer is your livelihood, you drag yourself out of bed and take care of the issue. (Not saying that all business owners are available at 1 AM for clients, but the fact is they are always on call 24/7 working, planning and worrying about their business!)
The problem though is something I hear over and over in talking with business owners, there is never enough time to work "on" your business, as you are always working "in" your business, making sales, solving problems and just handling the daily activities. Meaning that many times business owners spend so much of their time making today happen they rarely have time to plan and lay out their future needs and goals along with ways to adapt to those needs.
Due to this, and the experiences we have had at Advantage 1 Insurance in the past two weeks: 1.making a physical move to a new office in our Sauk Centre location and all that has come with that as far as bumps in the road, 2. implementing a new client management software system so we can work more efficiently for our clients, which too has some hiccups in just the learning curve of a new way to do things internally, I have to wonder, does this saying not only mean there are difficulties planning for the future but also in taking care of the details that, although effect business, aren't direct correlations to the business itself?
For example, in our move from one location to another in Sauk Centre we moved from a building lease to a building owned, well obviously that changes the need for a multitude of things but being I think about insurance constantly it made me focus there. No longer can we just insure the property we have inside we have to make sure the building is insured as well. Yet, being involved in the transition of moving everything over, and just making sure we didn't forget anything, I was able to see how easily we could have forgotten to notify our agent about that major change.
Secondly, in regards to our software change, this time it was minimal cost for local equipment, but still very time consuming in making sure everything was / is set up properly. If this would have been a purchase of equipment / property to make our efficiency increase, it may have increased our need for insurance coverage again and with all that has been on all of our minds, it again could have easily been overlooked to make sure that happened.
What am I trying to say? To all of you, business owners, farmers and everyone out there, life is busy, and as you make changes in your life / business, they will take up your time and make it easy to forget about the details of making sure you have insurance coverage for all of your needs that have changed, so please, contact your current agent, or if you just want another opinion, give us a call, we offer a free no obligation consultation with respect to your time to help you work "on" your business!
By the way, make sure you check us out on Facebook to see pictures of the new building and also please share this and stop by on October 11, 2012 from 4-6:30 PM for our open house in Sauk Centre.
