Keep a finger on the pulse of your infrastructure

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Bikky Khosla | 26 Feb, 2013
How will your air conditioning perform this summer? Does rain water leak through your office ceiling? What about the power generators? Do the machines and equipment at the manufacturing unit require maintenance? Does your security system have a glitch? Many small business owners don't like to involve themselves with these type of infrastructural issues. They view this as a waste of time. Should this be so?

I think small business owners should do the opposite - they should keep themselves updated about the minute details of their infrastructure all the time. This may sound impractical and unrealistic as most of us usually have to keep ourselves as busy as a bee to look after other key activities related to sales, revenue, client management, and so on, but the fact is that infrastructural issues should receive no less attention. At times, you may regret not having done that.

What if your electrical wiring is out-of-date, a fire breaks out at your factory, you don't have enough adequate fire safety measures in place and the nearest fire station is five km away . . . you're unaware that your air conditioning system has not been inspected for a long time and as a result, consuming a lot of electricity . . . some security lighting may not be working for some time making your premises prone to theft . . . a server may have gone out of capacity affecting productivity and output of your employees . . . if you focus, you'll probably find dozens of such issues to take care of.

You may already have one or two employees to look after these issues, but this could never be equivalent to a keeping a full-fledged Administration Department by a large organization. With very limited manpower, these few people are most likely to find it difficult to keep track of everything from security and safety to transport, registry and property management. At times, they may miss some crucial points. This is where your responsibility as the owner comes in.

As a business grows, the infrastructure will have to grow with it too, but most of the times, particularly with small businesses, it usually happens in an unplanned fashion only as it is required. This is the reason why infrastructural lapses could be everywhere, and at times even some small problems, if left unattended, can lead to big ones, robbing off our sanity, and resulting in higher costs and less productivity - things we will more likely escape if we keep our eyes open.