“Disaster recovery isn’t about backups. It’s about getting back to business.”
– Jores Minasvand
What would happen if the single platform your business depends on suddenly went down? Whether it’s for sales, client delivery, or customer data, over-reliance on one platform is one of the biggest hidden risks for small and mid-sized businesses.
In this episode, we talk about how to prepare for the unexpected and build resilience so your business can keep running no matter what happens. From disaster recovery to cybersecurity, we break down practical strategies to protect your operations and your revenue.
We cover:
- Why every business needs a contingency plan for people, technology, and location
- The bare minimum you need to stay operational in a crisis
- Why disaster recovery isn’t just backup. It’s restoration and continuity
- The hidden risks of depending on “big platforms” like Facebook or Rogers
- How to assess your risk tolerance and plan accordingly
- Why human error and cyberattacks can be just as dangerous as natural disasters
If your business would grind to a halt if one platform failed, this conversation will help you plan ahead and reduce risk, so you can sleep better at night.
Want to make your business more resilient without overcomplicating it? Join the free Visionary Founders Club, a community where small and mid-sized business owners learn, grow, and prepare for the future together.
“Cybersecurity and human error can take you down faster than any natural disaster.” – Anna Angelova
Transcript for “Reducing Risk When Your Business Relies on One Key Platform”
The transcript below was automatically generated. Please ignore any errors or inconsistencies in the text.
Anna Angelova 0:06
Welcome to the Thursday episode of More Than Just Task Management, your favorite daily podcast where we help you build a thriving business. I’m Anna Angelova, business coaching consultant, co-host of this daily podcast and together with me is Joris Minosfand.
My co-host and fellow business consultant who is enjoying European summer right now. Hey Joris, how are you doing?
Jores Minasvand 0:31
Anna, don’t be shy. I’m your sidekick and I love being a sidekick. And Oh my goodness, today it was so warm. I yesterday I wore a long sleeve because it was cold in the morning.
By noon I was boiling and sweating. I had to send both of my shirts for dry cleaning. Today I wore short. Yeah, today I wore short sleeves and it was perfect. It was so hot. I walked into the office and air conditioning was full blown.
Anna Angelova 0:52
Hello.
Jores Minasvand 1:01
So.
It is warm, like a summer warm here, so I’m not rubbing it in. Sorry, but hello. Hello from Syria, Southern Syria. I just had a beautiful, original, authentic Syrian dinner.
Anna Angelova 1:07
Yeah, please keep on rubbing it.
Jores Minasvand 1:18
Taff liver with onion and the goulash sauce with pumpkin and crouton soup with pumpkin seed oil.
Anna Angelova 1:31
OK, now I feel hungry. Now let’s OK, let’s let’s go ahead and talk about business. One day, one day we might have a food podcast or something like this, but or or or like a vlog. This is, this is.
Jores Minasvand 1:31
And about 12/12 glasses of wine, so.
Business first.
Oh yeah, that’ll be nice.
Restaurant. We will book a restaurant, like a restaurant while we’re eating these livers and drinking Syrian wine. We will, yeah, we will do our podcast.
Anna Angelova 1:50
For a different.
Awesome. One day. OK, today the episode is all about reducing risk if your business relies on one key platform. So whether it’s for your operations or whatever it is, it might be.
Your whole business, right? It might be your whole business. Everything from sales to delivery might be on one key platform. So how do you reduce risk? And nowadays with technology, it’s really, really important to think about this and.
Jores Minasvand 2:23
Mm-hmm.
Anna Angelova 2:41
Businesses big enough or small enough to ignore this topic. That’s why we are having this discussion today and especially like you as a small business corporations, they have.
Jores Minasvand 2:47
Hmm.
Anna Angelova 2:57
Even account managers and they could be very good relationship with those platforms and the people who are responsible for those platforms. And Azure, as you know, you’ve worked with so many corporations and you’ve worked with service providers and software providers as well.
Jores Minasvand 3:13
Mm.
Anna Angelova 3:16
You know that they naturally they pay attention to the corporate, to the enterprise accounts, but as a small mid-sized business you probably don’t get any kind of attention. So what do you do? How can you reduce the risk if your business relies on one key platform when it comes to?
Jores Minasvand 3:24
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Anna Angelova 3:36
The technology you’re using, right? So Joris, you have so much experience there and I’ll just let you share your thoughts and I’ll chime in if I have anything to to share.
Jores Minasvand 3:39
Yeah.
Thank you, Anna. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to articulate it.
It’s all in my head. I just need to articulate it right way. So it’s all about contingency. And if you think about your so you’re a small business owner, 6:30 in the morning or if you’re an early riser like me, 4:30 in the morning, you walk into your your, you unlock the door, you disarm the alarm.
You walk into your business.
Stop there and look around. So there are three things that are that you have to cover in your contingency plan. One is the physical location. If your product or service is reliant on the physical location, then you have to think about.
Contingency for your physical location. Then the second thing is your people.
What if you have in your business? If you have five people or 20 people, what you need to think about is what is the number of bare minimum staff that you need to run your business in a disaster mode? And then the third one is platform and data.
What is the technology that I need to have to run my business if I do even, and what is the data that I need? And then for each one of these there are different level of contingency disaster recoveries and and then the 2nd way of looking at this is.
One is availability. So how quickly do you really need to make your services or product available? So in your business plan, when you’re doing your business plan before you start up any kind of business.
Uh.
The largest contributing factor for the business of failure of the business in the first year is finance. The second one is not planning for disaster.
So when you plan for your disaster recovery, you say, OK, based on the nature of my business, I need to have a warehouse of 6000 square feet.
With the equipment, with the list of equipment in there, I need to have a minimum of eight people with all of their roles. I need to have platform ABC and DI need to have a pipeline of 100 mega gigabit per second, whatever the rate the speed is to the Internet.
And I need all of my customer data and all of my applications restored within three hours of a start of a business day. And we used to do this. I’ve done this for, I can’t say the name because they’re a public.
Ontario Public Corporation. We for twice a year we used to go to an IBM facility on Steeles and Warden, the big IBM section. We had a section.
Rented. So we would go there at 6:00 AM, replicating a disaster environment and then the business was timing us.
How fast can we restore all the essential systems so for them to be able to pay the pensioners? Because they had pensioners that lived in Vietnam, Thailand, Florida, Australia.
And these guys relied on their pension being transferred to them on a timely basis so they can pay their bills. If this company failed, they will be sued by the pensioners. Something fierce. So we used to go on and so this is how I know how you need to. So again as a.
Small business and and it could be that I think one of our customers, all she needs to do is to be able to go to an office, fire up a laptop and log into her, log into Clio. She’s 99% up and running.
So you need to 1st identify which components of your business are essential and then have a recovery plan for that essential component. And then again, that’s not where you stop.
What that means is I have, I can in less than four hours stand up my business so I can continue the service or the product that continues to bring revenue. But you don’t stop there. Then you take the other 80% of your non-essential business and you restore it.
But you need to identify that core part of your business that you require to maintain your revenue generation and have contingency for that. So it’s all about contingency and if you don’t have a contingency plan in your business plan.
You are walking in a minefield.
Anna Angelova 9:05
Yeah. And nowadays, especially like one of the things that very interesting I heard on a training a couple of weeks ago where I was thinking, will it really go that way that you know with the so-called A I think that’s going on that it’s getting easier and easier to build in.
House and if you think about going in that direction, building in house, it requires that kind of thinking. It requires for you to think about it that OK, this is a key.
Jores Minasvand 9:26
Yep.
Mhm.
Anna Angelova 9:40
Platform. If this is something key software that we require that we need, like you said Joris, we need like you need to have contingency, you have the availability, the disaster recovery, all these kind of things. It’s really, really important to do this and think about it, go through the process.
Process and figure out like figure out a way because you know what happens. Remember like a few times actually. I think one of them was this year at some point when Facebook was down.
It’s like it impacted so many people who use it for training, for live videos, for ads and and all these kind of things. So and and this is, this is one of the caveats when you depend on something big like this that it doesn’t happen often, right? Like so when we’re talking about the 99%.
10:16
Yep.
Jores Minasvand 10:23
Maybe.
Anna Angelova 10:36
Then .999 availability. Yeah, they they have it like that. They probably have it when you think about it, but when this thing happened.
Jores Minasvand 10:38
5 minutes now, Yep.
But those are for essential services. If your business is identified as essential service, yes. Remember what happened when I was in Europe a few years ago when Rogers went down, all hospital, hospital communication went down, 911 went down.
Anna Angelova 10:55
Oh yeah, yeah, in Canada here.
Jores Minasvand 11:00
Right. So this is an essential service. This requires 59 but for you and and these are very expensive. The contingency is the most expensive part of business planning and business implementation. That’s why a lot of company ignore it, but they don’t understand their at risk they put themselves in so.
Anna Angelova 11:00
Yep, Yep.
Jores Minasvand 11:18
Again, for you, you need to identify what is the bare minimum that you require. Maybe you don’t need 5 nines, maybe you need 8088.2. The difference between 88.2 to 95 nines is could be $2,000,000 a year that you have to pay.
To have those contingencies available, you can’t afford it. So identify what is the bare minimum that you have. What is the bare minimum of your business components? Physical location, people, technology and data. These three pillars.
That you need to have up and running within two to four hours for you to continue to generate revenue because without revenue you’re you’re bankrupt, right? And without proper service you lose your brand. So do this analysis in the beginning.
Anna Angelova 12:09
Yep.
Jores Minasvand 12:13
Then do another analysis of how much does it cost for you to implement and maintain this.
And then?
Like I said, this, this company that we worked with, they were paying the pensioners. So by law, by Ontario law, we were accountable to show the auditors that we twice a year, every six months.
It was a grueling 24 hours. We showed the auditors that within less than 24 hours, all our essential systems that required to pay the pensioners, almost 3 million pensioners, their pension and we we proved it to them.
We actually have transactions paying. We control everything over. Now the biggest lesson that I learned from these exercises was OK, so I have a $20 million a year business. I’m gonna spend $200,000.
To have.
Already and I’m going to test it once a year or twice a year. During these tests we was something. A realization came to me that I went to the VP of IT and then together we went to the CEO and we discussed it with them.
And we didn’t account for this was OK, so you are the essential part of essential team. At 12:00 AM on a Saturday, you get a pager that downtown Toronto is under 16 feet of snow and it’s frozen.
Right. So you know it’s called a protocol. So they someone one of the, I think it was just a CEO. He was the only person who could call the the the Dr. protocol, disaster recovery protocol. Once he called it, a series of processes would happen. All the key people would get e-mail.
And they had a document to follow. If I get this e-mail that the CEO called the Dr. I need to.
This document and go ABCD. So now Fast forward to noon the next day, 12 hours after the midnight. We are noon Sunday. We are in Boston. All of our disasters critical systems are up and running.
So we tell call the CEO and say we just ran our our pension payment. 5600 pensioners that were supposed to get paid on Sunday got paid. Everything is beautiful, right? We just.
Downtown Toronto crashed. We rebuilt the business in 12 hours in downtown Boston.
What’s next?
What happens afterwards?
Can we operate for next 16 years in downtown Boston?
No.
At some point when all the snow thaws in downtown Toronto, we have to bring the business systems back to Toronto and we we realized that we couldn’t do that. The cost of doing that was not 200,000, but maybe.
2 million, maybe more. So it’s such a it’s not a dogma, but it’s such a incredible circular problem that you can spend millions in.
Documenting, practicing your Dr. and you put a medal on your shoulder and say we are ready for Dr. but we’re not ready to come back. Oops.
Oops. Yep, we didn’t have the auditors because auditors never questions us. Even this is the flaw. Auditors never questions us. How long would it take you to come back?
Anna Angelova 16:03
Yep. Oops.
Jores Minasvand 16:17
In 12 hours, you stored all the systems in Boston. How are you going to bring it back to Toronto?
Anna Angelova 16:25
Yep.
Jores Minasvand 16:26
So you need to do all of this planning if you really care about your business. And again, your scale will be $20,000 and the cost of bringing it back is $50,000, but you need to plan for these.
And you never know when.
Anna Angelova 16:41
Yeah, yeah. And one thing I know it’s going a little bit like a longer conversation, but with all the experience you have and it’s it’s important like it’s an important conversation. But one thing that as well that I think we need to mention today.
Jores Minasvand 16:48
Yeah, sorry, I app allowed, yeah.
Anna Angelova 16:58
Like the other thing, especially if your business is, it’s not a ma and papa shop that’s like, you know, making 50,000 a year if it’s more of a mid-sized business. One of the other things when it comes to reducing risk in terms of like when your business relies on one key platform, it’s also.
Jores Minasvand 17:08
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Anna Angelova 17:17
Cybersecurity, this is, this is another thing you need to be very careful with and it’s not just the customer data. And I know at some point I saw a few articles, I think a couple of these companies were in UK if I’m not mistaken and I think one of them actually had to file for bankruptcy.
Jores Minasvand 17:19
Yep, hackers.
Yep.
Anna Angelova 17:37
Where they were, they were locked out of of like the of their system and there was a ransom demand and they they they couldn’t afford it, they couldn’t do anything about it and they they had to file for bankruptcy.
So this is another important aspect of today’s world, and especially if you are utilizing A I to build your own tools and software where you are not the professional and you have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes. This is a very, very.
Jores Minasvand 18:06
Mm-hmm.
Anna Angelova 18:15
Important and cybersecurity will probably become a key topic that even as a small, mid-sized business owner, you need to be aware of.
Jores Minasvand 18:24
Absolutely. That’s part of your biggest part of Dr. since 2012.
For any kind of corporation has been cybersecurity hack, a denial of service being hacked or whatever.
Absolutely. It’s very important. And how do you recover from that?
Anna Angelova 18:50
Mm-hmm. So, um, OK.
Jores Minasvand 18:52
So yeah, even a little bit long, but these are essential. Again, as a business owner, it’s your decision, your decision to make. Do I want to spend the money and sleep tight or not? Or can I? What is the?
Mitigation, right? What is my risk tolerance as a business owner, right? So I can, how can I much talk? So I have six months of reserves in my bank account and I’m pretty confident with my my brand will not get hurt my customer.
Anna Angelova 19:14
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Jores Minasvand 19:29
Because they rather me spend less money and keep the prices lower than me having planning for all this contingency, spend the money and raise the prices. So what is my risk tolerance? I can be down for a week.
That’s OK. What I’ll do is I’ll go to a cyber cafe. I’m going to open up my e-mail list, the my top 20 customers that generate 20% of customers that generate most of my 80% of our revenue. I’m going to e-mail them and say we were attacked or Toronto is underwater, blah blah blah.
And then expect delays. That’s fine. But if you have 0 tolerance for risk or can’t afford it, you only have 330 days of payroll in your bank account and you need the revenue within hours, then it’s a different story.
But you need to do that assessment. It’s very important.
Anna Angelova 20:26
Yeah, and when it comes to this, unless you are the expert, what I would say highly, highly recommend is get expert help like when it comes to reducing risk for your business, especially if you rely on a key platform.
Jores Minasvand 20:35
What’s that mean?
Hmm.
Yep.
Anna Angelova 20:43
Get expert help. Get expert help for cybersecurity. Get expert help for these contingencies we’ve been talking about. It’s something that, OK, it’s an investment in your business. It’s an investment, like you said, Joris.
If you are worrying about it and they have sleepless nights, isn’t it better to invest and and be able to sleep well because you know that you have taken care of these things?
Jores Minasvand 21:11
Well, I was again.
What is your risk tolerance? There’s a measure, there’s a KPI called risk tolerance, which you need to put that KPI, measure that KPI for your business and make a decision. But yeah, it’s like it all depends.
On what your what your risk level tolerance is and again some of the like part of the risk tolerance is personal.
But part of it is also the criticality of your business and how long can you be down without losing your brand quality or your customers?
Anna Angelova 21:52
Yes, yeah.
Jores Minasvand 21:52
So you need to do all of that, that calculation, yes.
Anna Angelova 21:54
Calculations like see. Yeah, see. Absolutely, absolutely. So I would highly recommend as an action item for today, I would say this is one of those conversations where it’s like don’t get the don’t freak out, freak out, but don’t freak out so.
Jores Minasvand 21:59
100%.
And.
Anna Angelova 22:14
As a call to action, like an action action item for you, an action item for you after listening to this episode is to go calculate this. Look at numbers like look at where you are, what do your financials look like and see.
Jores Minasvand 22:14
Yeah, like.
Mhm.
Anna Angelova 22:30
How long can you afford to to stay afloat? And then thinking about, OK, imagine I don’t have my system, what happens? Can I even contact my my clients? Can I even let them know what’s going on? Like really, really think about this and then based on this then you can see OK.
Jores Minasvand 22:37
Yep.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Anna Angelova 22:50
This is where we are. Like you said, it looks like it’s six months. It’s good. It’s not, it’s not the like it’s not urgent or something like this. So you might actually budget for something for the next year, for an investment next year for example to to start at least start something.
Jores Minasvand 23:03
And.
Yep.
Anna Angelova 23:09
Or you might found that oopsie, it’s actually 30 days and maybe, maybe it’s good to to look into this now. So highly recommend don’t just listen to this conversation, don’t just freak out, take action. Action always helps when you freak out.
And also the other thing that we’ve been mentioning this week and I’m inviting you again for more on this topic and all topics related to running a business, to being a business owner in 21st century, a visionary business owner in 21st century.
Join our community. Join the Visionary Founders Club. It’s a brand new community. We just soft launched it, what, a couple of days ago, and most of the people that are part of the community right now are people that we’ve personally reached out to.
And they joined the moment. The moment we we offered it, they joined. So it’s a new community, a growing community designed specifically for business owners where we have these kind of conversations and these kind of topics, additional resources, additional help.
So highly recommend joining. The link is in the description of this podcast episode and we would really be happy to see you there.
Jores Minasvand 24:32
Yep. I just want to close the conversation with this one small note and and this is where experience with becomes helpful. So when I we were just talking about almost 30 minutes we talked about.
Disaster where Toronto goes on snow or water or Boston is New York is covered by a tsunami or whatever. But there are smaller disasters that can happen. We don’t plan for them that may.
Affect your business. So for example, remember in the early 2000, late 90s and early 2000 when the the the e-commerce to boom.
And then boomed again that have an e-commerce website.
And remember e-commerce website had HTTPS so it had had to be secure.
This gentleman, in his infinite, whether he forgot or neglected, he did not renew his certificate.
And all of a sudden his website.
Stop.
Purchasing at then it wasn’t renewal of your certificate it used to take.
Anna Angelova 26:01
Uh, I’m. I’m hearing you a little bit choppy. So all of a sudden what happened?
Jores Minasvand 26:07
Oh, sorry.
His certificate, his website certificate expired. He he let the certificate lapse. So when you when you create a website, you issue a certificate makes your HTTP HTTPS.
Secure e-commerce transactions.
Anna Angelova 26:28
Yes, yeah, that’s correct.
Jores Minasvand 26:30
Right expire.
He didn’t pay attention. He let it expire. But then it NBC used to renew the certificates and it took three days. His e-commerce website was down for three days and this is a big disaster.
For a small business because.
It doesn’t have to be snow or a tsunami. It could be a technology mistake.
One of the CEOs.
Worked with he called me on a Saturday night 9:00 PM and said I was doing account to the I did a delete start dot start with no parameter and I just realized I don’t have a backup.
I need your help.
This guy deleted his entire financial from day one, 15 years of financial information with one keystroke. That’s a disaster.
Right. So I’m just saying that’s why I said close your eyes, walking through all of the components in from physical location, human being, human mistakes.
Or not availability and technology and account for those based on your risk level. Sorry I I rambled on but this is a very important topic for us to cover for.
Owners.
Anna Angelova 28:11
It is a very important topic and you’re right that disaster recovery doesn’t mean not having your system right. It doesn’t. It doesn’t mean the need to be a disaster. It can be human error. It can be someone like you said, forgetting to renew the certificate, the security certificate for the website where it’s like who would go and.
Jores Minasvand 28:21
Yep.
Anna Angelova 28:31
Provide their data on an e-commerce side, like provide credit card information, things like this. So absolutely, absolutely. And again, it’s a topic that is really important.
Jores Minasvand 28:35
Work.
Google.
OK.
This is not secure.
Anna Angelova 28:45
Yeah, it tells you, it tells you, and it’s a really important topic. That’s why I highly, highly urge you join the community. This is where we share even more on all these important topics. We have different types of posts and different resources to help you with running your business.
Jores Minasvand 28:47
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you have access to us and all of our experiences, right?
Anna Angelova 29:08
Yep, Yep, absolutely. And I so yeah, go join it. And tomorrow join the community. We’d love to see you there. And tomorrow we are wrapping up the week with a shorter conversation, most likely. Should you hire family and friends for your business, especially in the early stages?
When you are starting, when you probably don’t have any kind of revenue and you don’t have money to pay people. So should you hire family or friends? This is something that probably a lot of us have been thinking about, so.
Join us tomorrow for another conversation and another episode of More Than Just Task Management. This is your favorite daily podcast. Sometimes we talk for 10 minutes, sometimes we talk for 35 minutes. So you never know. You never know.
Jores Minasvand 29:44
Mhm.
Yeah, I promise I won’t rumble on tomorrow.
Anna Angelova 29:59
OK. OK. Thank you, Joris. Really, really thank you so much. You have so much experience and knowledge in this area. It was so great hearing everything you know about it and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s conversation.
Jores Minasvand 30:07
Yep.
Anna Angelova 30:17
Bye.
Jores Minasvand 30:18
I live so many of these, not funny, but thank you for having me, Anna and Thursday and we’ll see everyone and you and everyone and you and everyone on Friday. Not everyone, just you.
Anna Angelova 30:29
Yep. Yep. Tomorrow. OK. OK. OK. Bye.
