Crisis Management Planning

It’s Saturday in Shanghai and that makes it time to celebrate another victory at RightSite.  We completed another week of productive work under substandard conditions.  We successfully produced a our latest newsletter, got about 90 new property listings added to our directory, and have gained considerable ground on completing our RightSite Pro features without having to physically assault our web development vendors.

All part of life at a start up.

When starting up a company we operate on the lowest possible budget that we can until we start generating a profit. That means that we often overwork our teams, our equipment, and even our offices.

So the office decided to fight back a bit this week.  On Tuesday the power suddenly went out at lunchtime, and after several adventures with circuit breakers, UPS, and shutting down the mail server, the phone server and the router, and some consultation with our neighborhood electrician, we figured out that one of the air conditioners had gone evil. (Air conditioners routinely double as heaters in China). At least by isolating the problem we were able to get electricity restored, although some of the team had a chilly afternoon.

So after the electrician was sent away, the air conditioner repairman was summoned. When he finally arrived the next day, and after blowing out the circuit breakers a few more times, we were able to find out that the air conditioner had lost a capacitor (or at least it kind of looked like a capacitor, but I’m not sure of the Chinese for capacitor)

Just imagine what we could have done under reasonable working conditions.

Our other victory of the week was resucitating my old desktop PC to put it to work as another server.  With the advent of our RightSite Pro products we will also be putting into place a training server that we will use to train our new staff and do testing on new features.  So the team from our IT vendor, Fusion were kind enough to help us fit out the machine with some new hard drives so that it could be set up for its new duties. Total cost of hardware — RMB 386

Once the new hardware was in place, we set up a server installation of Ubuntu Linux, Apache webserver software, MySQL and PHP. So now this old PC is running a LAMP stack and is ready for its new role as an in-house web server.  Total cost of software — RMB 0!  (Take that Bill Gates!)

There are things that RightSite willingly spends on — the development of our website, professional hosting of RightSite and the training and development of our staff. But in non-core areas, we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

Of course, working with equipment like this puts us in danger of more equipment adventures like we had earlier in the week, but that is part of the deal with start up. When we start bringing in more money, we start spending on more expensive systems.

In any case, this gave us an idea for another story on our website.  In the coming weeks, watch RightSite for a feature on crisis management planning in China!