BFD S1EP15 â Fire Drill #14: Before a Platform Shutdown Disrupts the Business
Clean transcript (lightly edited: name spelling fixed, paragraphs added, a few false starts trimmed). Items to verify are marked [VERIFY].
Hello, this is Fire Drill number 14, Before a Platform Shutdown Disrupts Your Business. I'm attorney Tamsen Horton. Business moments are predictable. Panic is optional.
So I want you to picture this. You open your email on a Tuesday and there it is: "After careful consideration, we're sunsetting our service. Your account will close in 30 days." Maybe it's the scheduling tool your whole booking process runs on. The free app connecting your checkout to your email list. The platform that holds your client recordings. Or a bigger company bought your favorite little tool and quietly decided it's not worth keeping.
Here's the thing that very few people say out loud. Every tool your business runs on is a business too. And any business can shut down, get acquired, change its pricing overnight, or pivot away from what you needed.
So here's how this alarm sounds. A shutdown email, sometimes with months of notice, sometimes with practically none. A free or cheap tool that you forgot a core workflow depends on suddenly gets priced way out of reach. And this one is affecting your systems, your core work processes, and that risk gets built in long before the notice ever arrives, before you hear the fire alarm. It starts the day you began using the tool and never asked, what happens if this disappears?
If you've been around me for more than 30 seconds, you know I've always called it team tech and team humans. When I hire anything, even when I buy a blender, I consider that an employee in my home. Microphones, computers, vacuums, dishes, my scheduling tool, Kajabi, Notion, Google. Those are all employees. And just like in the human world, we expect people to move on. We expect people to quit. So all you need to do is apply common sense, or let's call it common experience, something we're familiar with. Everything you hire, everything you use, is an employee in your world because it's there to make things easier.
In fact, I have fired many an air fryer, because the biggest, best, fanciest air fryer was the worst employee in our home. And you know what made a stellar employee? The $39 air fryer from Costco. That is going to inform and frame the discussion we're about to have.
So, my favorite question: why do you have a smoke detector in your house? To warn you before the fire breaks out and consumes your home. Well, I built one for your business. It's 11 questions. It will take you about three minutes, and it shows you exactly which fires your business is most likely to have, including ones that are already smoldering. The link is in the description. Please go use the smoke detector.
When the fire alarm goes off, we have two choices. Are we reacting or responding?
Reacting looks like frenzied panic. The notice shows up. You aren't quite sure whether to believe it. You may not even open your email. The deadline comes and goes, and suddenly that employee is gone. It's like they gave notice, but you weren't there to hear it. And now you show up to work and you're like, wait, where is Susan? Where's John? Where's Notion?
I had this with a tool. I did hear the notice; I was paying attention when they gave it. It was a great app called Volley [VERIFY name/spelling], and it allowed asynchronous communication with someone. Someone could purchase time with me, and the app handled the communication and also charged the minutes, so I didn't have to keep track of anything. It was incredible. And they closed it down. So that's the equivalent: your team tech gives you notice, you may or may not have opened that email, and then you show up to work and they're gone.
To use an extreme example, because I don't think Notion is going anywhere: if Notion suddenly wasn't at work anymore, I'd be like, oh no. But I've also built in redundancies. Knowing which redundancies you need in place and which are simply busywork, overkill, and non-essential is a core piece of this drill, and we'll get to it. Reacting is freaking out, posting on social media, losing your mind, whether you got notice or found out after the fact.
Responding looks totally different. Responding is very calm. Anything critical is already backed up on your own terms. That's what I mean by having redundancies in place. You already know which tools are truly irreplaceable and which are simply convenient. The notice arrives, you put the deadline on your calendar, you migrate as needed, or maybe you just eliminate the tool because you don't need it anymore. It's calm and methodical, and something becomes an inconvenience, not a crisis.
I'm going to recap the dog story yet again, because little did I know the biggest mess I've had to clean up in forever was so applicable. When we got our first dog, the breeder said, book the groomer every four weeks, but you still need to know how to bathe your dog, because one day she's going to get sick or roll in something truly awful. The platform, team tech, whatever tool you're using, is the groomer. It does a great job. It takes care of everything. And you still have to be able to bathe your own dog. That means: if my calendar tool went down, could I still take care of my calendar the way it needs to be handled? If Notion disappeared? If Kajabi disappeared? If Google disappeared? Yes, someone else is taking care of it, and I could still get the job done if I had to. If the groomer suddenly closed up shop, I could still bathe the dog.
So let's take a moment and run the drill. D-R-I-L-L.
D: Don't react. Also, don't ignore notices in your email, and do not panic-migrate everything in a weekend. I have helped many, many businesses, including myself, migrate off tools. And the very first step is eliminating or essentializing, whichever way you like to think of it. Okay, we no longer have this tool. Do we still need it? Do we need to replace this employee? If metaphorical John walks out the door, are we okay without John? Panic-migrating everything is something I don't do and don't endorse. It's a great time to ask, yes, we have to move, but does this actually make the move? Do we truly need it?
This is top of mind for me because I'm watching so many people go berserk with AI. They're building skills and automating things that shouldn't even be there in the first place. So here's my acronym for team. T is time: always knowing how much time the thing takes. There are different ways of tracking that, and it's very enlightening. E is eliminate, or essentialize. They mean one and the same. A is automate. And M is spend money, hire humans, hire tools. What I watch people do is think they're doing TEAM, team tech, team humans, and they're not. They're buying MEAT all day long. If we rearrange the letters, we start by spending money and hiring things. Then typically the tool or the human says, oh, you should eliminate this and do that, and it's almost always a disaster. If your team isn't lining up the way you thought it would, you've probably rearranged your letters. But I digress.
R: Record everything. Your own exports or backups of anything mission critical, kept somewhere that doesn't depend on that platform's future. And "somewhere" can be digital, but for anything that could bring down your business, your life, or your finances, and this is more passwords and access codes, please keep a paper copy, or a copy somewhere that doesn't need a tech tool to open it. Some fires aren't just one thing. A shutdown can hit the tool, the backup, and the login to reach the backup all at once. So know what is mission critical. I have a ton in Notion. Notion is my content infrastructure, my digital infrastructure. It keeps track of everything. If Notion went down, I'm not replacing all of that content. The videos are over on YouTube. The blog posts are over on Kajabi. My business runs on that content, but it isn't mission critical. So it's about being discerning enough to know the difference.
I: Identify the real risk. How core is this tool to your revenue? A tool that delivers your core revenue is a different level of emergency than a tool that makes your social graphics. For me, I love Tockify Calendar [VERIFY spelling; transcript said "Talkify"]. I've used it for years. I think it's still around $80 a year. It links Google Calendar and I embed it, so it shows up on my Kajabi landing pages. I have an events tab on my website that's a landing page with Tockify embedded. The whole workflow is chef's kiss. But if it disappeared, I'd be irritated, and I'd be okay.
L: Lead with calm. When you get notice that a team tech employee is quitting or going to work somewhere else, pay attention. Okay, we got notice. Tockify is leaving the building. Do we need to replace it, or with what we've already hired and working in the company, is it going to work? You have time to work through the decision tree on whether we need to replace that team tech person. I use "person" in a very non-human way, but I view my tech as human, so it's hard. You have time to build your migration plan and respond to what's going on.
L: Lock in the lesson. After you move, ask yourself, do I have the same dependency with the new tool? When you view your tool as an employee, they're at-will employment. There are humans running those businesses. They could close up shop anytime, with or without notice. So the lesson is a continual one: yes, I'm bringing someone on, and should they not show up for work, what do we have that can still keep running?
I'll share a story I heard directly from a friend whose son had this job. He'd finished college and was working for a company that makes the butter packets for McDonald's. As I understood it, they run their normal butter factory producing all of those packets, I think for North America. And as part of their contract, they're required to maintain an entire duplicate facility, so that if anything happens to the primary butter factory, the other one can be turned on and shipping butter within 24 hours. Complete redundancy. The whole building, all of the tooling. If factory A doesn't show up for work, factory B is there to clock in right on schedule. [VERIFY before using publicly: secondhand story.] It's absolutely fascinating. On a much different scale, in our businesses we're doing similar thinking.
If you're not sure which of your tools is a single point of failure, that is exactly what the smoke detector shows you. I built this because there was not a smoke detector for our businesses. We have them in our homes. We install them. They're part of code. After dealing with so many business fires, I thought, you know what, I can do this. We need a smoke detector. It's as accessible, understandable, and targeted as I can make it. I just can't take it for you. So please use it, see what fires it brings to your attention. Love it? Hate it? Let me know, because I'm here so it works the best for you.
Speaking of things that should be working for you, let's move into the fire extinguisher part of the podcast. When your house is on fire, you're not going to the store to buy a fire extinguisher. You're calling the fire department. When your business is on fire, you're not running the fire drills. You're calling the professionals. You might need a lawyer, an accountant, a developer. You don't have time to do a checklist or build a system, because the fire has happened. So you have the opportunity right now, listening to this, to build your fire extinguisher before the fire starts.
Number one: regular exports or backups of anything mission critical, meaning the business could not continue to operate without it. If we needed to sell the business, we'd need it. Do not keep it only on your platform. An export of your email list is mission critical. Please go back and listen to the episode on before you get locked out of your email platform. Content comes with a caveat, and I'll use myself as the example. Yes, I have content in Notion, where I keep track of links and show notes. The files get created in Google Drive, and I upload them to the Kajabi podcast, the Kajabi blog, or YouTube. If all my content were wiped out of every source, I'm the source of the content, so it would be a huge restart, but it wouldn't wipe out my business. So that is not mission critical for me. I'd prioritize a hard copy of my email list CSV. Course files, records. Only you know what is truly mission critical for you. It's like when they say your house is on fire, what are you grabbing? The pictures, the passport, those key pieces. If you had to start over, you could buy new furniture and clothing. If we all got out safely, there are only a few things that would be truly critical.
Number two: know which tools are irreplaceable and which are just convenient. Much like employees, everyone is replaceable. You might not want to replace them, and they may never be as good as the original, but everything is replaceable.
Number three: read all the shutdown notices when they arrive. Put the deadlines on your calendar. This is a great place to use skills you can develop in your AI. I share ones I use as part of the Business Fire Drills kit. You can set up skills to make sure you're not missing anything in your email, highlighting anything with words like shut down, notice, or business terminating. You can program all of that now.
Number four: don't let one vendor be a single point of failure for your whole business. Even me. I put the whole core of my business on Kajabi in November of 2015. Before that I was on WordPress, and I'd dealt with digital duct-taping things. I'd always been hesitant about an all-in-one platform, because if it goes down, you're really up a creek. But the more I researched, the more I thought, there are enough people, and at the time a couple of really large gurus had their businesses on Kajabi. Even if Kajabi goes down, I'm going to the beach. I'm not panicking, because there are people with far more at stake than me, which means Kajabi is going to fix it. So I shifted my perspective. And even Kajabi is not a single point of failure for my whole business. I always have an export of my email list, so I can always get in touch with people. I have content on YouTube and in Google Drive. The majority of my business is trusted and safe and stable in that location, and it still isn't a single point of failure.
Number five: keep a running list of alternatives so you're not shopping from scratch under pressure. In my Notion digital infrastructure team tech database, I have green for keep, red for fire, and a yellow caution for on probation or checking out. I always have my eyes open. If a business colleague I respect and trust, who does similar things, is raving about a tool, I make a note of it, so if I end up in a panic, I'm not starting from scratch and I'm not under pressure.
If your fire is already burning: read the notice, find out what's going on, export everything you can in the most portable format, migrate whatever makes you money first, and tell your customers as soon as it's appropriate if the shutdown is going to cause them any visible disruption. Hey, we're hiring a new employee, you might notice this. Or, hey, we're moving houses, you may notice this.
That brings me to your next right decision. One, do nothing, because you already export your critical data regularly. Two, put this drill in place, which is the right call if you run on team tech and have never exported anything from your tech. Three, send this to a friend. If you thought of someone, please send them the link to this episode. They'll send you a thank-you note. We don't want our friends' businesses to get burned. We just don't want anything burning.
Your free homework for today: list the tools your business can't run without. Next to each one, write the last time you exported your data out of it, and I mean mission critical data. The thing I export out of Kajabi is my email list. I always have a CSV of my email list that's less than 30 days old. That is mission critical, and it's the only thing I export out of Kajabi. If you've never exported anything, that's where you start.
No platform and no employee owes you a future. The businesses that come through a shutdown, an acquisition, a buyout, or whatever the case may be, are the ones that never outsourced everything to their team tech. Back to our dog example: even if the dog is going to the groomer, even if tech is being handled somewhere, you still know how to bathe your dog.
So run the smoke detector. The link is in the description. Business moments are predictable. Panic is optional. Run the fire drill before the fire alarm goes off.
