Ep. 61 Own Your Assets – Is Your Business Safe from Big Tech?

Own Your Assets – Is Your Business Safe from Big Tech?

With so much of our businesses running on technology, third-party apps, and monthly software subscriptions, is your business safe?

Whether on purpose or on accident your business could be removed from any source…would it survive?

Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean talk about the devastation that is possible in a time of censorship, hackers, big-tech, and algorithms running the show.

Learn some steps to keep your data, assets, and livelihood safe from “just in case.”

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 61

Torie: [00:00:00] You got your business. Like it was a necessity that you had to have these ads every day and everything is on Facebook 

Sean: [00:00:05] And major downtime. 

Torie: [00:00:07] Man, People crapping my pants.

Hey, welcome to smart AAF on your host. Torie Mathis. We have got a great show for you today, so let’s get started. Hey guys. Welcome to the show I’m Torie Mathis your host and I’m here with the one, the only Sean Mathis the Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum here on the show today.

Sean: [00:00:38] Hey

Torie: [00:00:39] So you guys, we got to get serious here.

I don’t have serious ones very often. This is one of them, some crazy shit going on. Crazy people getting shut down, companies deciding what’s okay. What’s not okay. It’s a weird time. And I know this happened over the summer and it really caught my eye when there was a group of doctors that went on TV and said some things that they felt and people were like, Nah, we don’t like you talking about that.

And what happened? Squarespace decided, Nope. You’re not allowed to say that and took their website down. And I believe at that time, MailChimp took their account down as well and said, we don’t like what you’re saying. And I was like, man, I’ve never seen that before. Like, that’s pretty weird. I would have never guessed that all this other stuff has it has, was ever going to happen.

Like it’s crazy town and maybe people who aren’t business owners don’t realize how crazy this is. I don’t want to get political, but like Parlor, that was a business. They had employees. 

Sean: [00:01:58] For people to disconnect the business from the person. So it’s not necessarily that they’re doing anything to a human they’re just shutting down an establishment, not realizing all the then humans.

That are, you know, suffering because of that. And it trickles, it trickles so much farther down than just that one establishment. I mean, it could be suppliers and all kinds of people that, that rely on whatever that one businesses that now have nothing to do with anything that are ultimately being punished.

Torie: [00:02:41] So when you’re doing business, especially like everybody’s digital, like you got to get your business online. It’s super necessary. World however, when you are putting your business online, you’re utilizing third party assets, essentially. For example, like parlor was on Amazon hosting. Like they didn’t have their own, like their hosting isn’t in the backyard and that’s how they get their website.

I think a lot of people don’t really understand, like how websites actually work. Like you have to have another company generally putting your website up. GoDaddy for example is like a host and they’re another one that has, you know, taken down websites because they didn’t like what was on there.

They didn’t you know, want that on their servers. So when you put your website out there, you are. You know, if you have your own hosting like you go through GoDaddy rather than using some type of builder, like I thought you would be okay, honestly, I’m like, see Squarespace, don’t use that shit. They’ll take your website down.

Then. I’m like, well, what the fuck are you supposed to do then? What did they come for? You? You know, that, that whole sane, like you thought it was fine. And then they came for someone else and you were like, it’s not me. It’s not me. 

Sean: [00:03:56] Well before we just started, like, what if you missed a payment or two and you didn’t realize it and they took your website down and now all of a sudden you don’t have a website.

And you’re like, well, what the hell? Why didn’t you tell me, you know, that you didn’t get the email or whatever the case, may your website? 

Torie: [00:04:08] Right. So if you have a third party or something like that, like it’s, it’s pretty much like your website probably has gone. So I don’t really want to get political on, like, whether they should take stuff down.

I’m just saying that anybody that has a business needs to make sure that they’re assets are there’s that you back things up that you like, he should always be a little bit prepared man. So before the cloud was very popular, I had all of my files on the hard drive. 

Sean: [00:04:42] That sucked.   

Torie: [00:04:46] learned like the hugest lesson. This had to be hours ago. So that was probably around when Bella was born. That was like nine years ago. So all of my client files, all of my programs, everything was on this hard drive, nothing was backed up and my hard drive died. Like just gone one day out of nowhere. I had no business, everything was on there.

I had to actually send it away to somebody for days and wait for it to come back. And, you know, from that, like I’m not doing anything like that. I make sure my shit backed up. Everything’s backed up. Even computer-wise 

Sean: [00:05:26] like your computer goes down, we can use mine like theirs. There’s backup for a backup. 

Torie: [00:05:32] Well, but if the computer went down, like there’s actually nothing on my computer, everything is in the cloud backed up and backed up somewhere else.

Sean: [00:05:39] Like, I mean, as far as being able to actually work, not, not cause even then, like, like if we only have the one you’d be down again until we got another. 

Torie: [00:05:51] So something that we do for all of our websites, which we were not on none of our clients, none of our stuff is on some third party builder type thing. You know, we, what was the what’s the we did a t-shirt site on it. What is the Shopify? Unfortunately like stuff like that. Third-party and no, it’s like such a good program to like, sell your stuff. Like that’s on their system. Like, you don’t own the website. Like you can’t like make a copy of it and take it with you.

So all of our stuff is like, we own all the assets. However, like, as you saw with some of these hosting things, like the hosting companies were like, Nope, take your stuff off. So all of our websites, we have backups daily backups that our website backs up. So if something happened, like we have them on our own files that we could put it up somewhere else.

So I hope that like, in all of this stuff, that’s happened, like be a little wary of where of using something, a service that you can’t make a backup of your website that you couldn’t put up. Like don’t be a shitty person and put bad stuff online and get kicked off of stuff. But people get kicked off on accident.

People have disagreements, I mean, political things like who knows what’s going to happen. You guys, so. Make sure that your website is completely backed up and backed up often with our clients that we have. We have a website maintenance program that we do that backups daily backups are just part of the things that we do that way if anything ever happened, we have a backup of it. You never know. So talking about those doctors though, that MailChimp kicked them off their service, which means they can’t even email anybody. And I’ve seen this happen to other people as well. So like fantastic that you’re growing your list, but make sure you have a copy of that.

Maybe make copies of your emails, like whatever you need to do, there’s automatic things that you can do so that you have backups of these things so that you don’t have to worry about it. And maybe making a schedule, a habit of backing up your list. I don’t know, depending on how often you grow your list, like for Miles Through Time, you’re always getting new subscribers.

Like every day probably weekly would be a good idea. Download your list. You have it. 

Sean: [00:07:58] I haven’t really thought about it,

Torie: [00:08:00] You know, but it probably would be a good thing. I’m like, we’re not doing anything that we think that we would get kicked off, but holy shit, like your last name starts with them. We don’t like people with the last name of M on, you know, what if the company that I was using to get those email lists did something that now all of a sudden was gone.

Sean: [00:08:18] I did nothing. And yet my business has been affected. No, that that’s, again, unfortunately, something you have to think about. And these days, 

Torie: [00:08:28] You know, we always talk about owning your assets in the way that a lot of people are like, well, I talked to all my clients on social media. I have lots of followers on Facebook or on Twitter or Instagram or whatever.

That’s not your account. Their only website is their Facebook page. You don’t have their email. You don’t have a way to read out to them. Like Donald Trump might’ve had a bazillion people following them on Twitter, but he doesn’t have their email address. You know what I mean? Like right now, like if you got shut down off of that, if like Facebook was the place you were going to be, and for some reason, Facebook decided that you know, we’re going to cancel a bunch of things.

Which happens all the time on accident, the algorithm gets screwed up and cancels it. Like it happens all the time. If you have all your eggs 

Sean: [00:09:12] Our ads happen, right. Facebook screws up the, the ads all the time and kicks ads off for no reason, ads that have been running for. For a really long time. 

Torie: [00:09:21] All of a sudden they’re like equal housing opportunity. You’re doing something wrong for this. Like they’re not housing. Like it’s just the random things. And there’ll be out for like a week or two. Like if that was the, like, if your business, like you’ve got your business, like it was a necessity that you had to have these ads every day and everything is on Facebook.

Sean: [00:09:39] And that’s a major downtime.

Torie: [00:09:40] Man. Be crapping my pants. Right? Like these things happen. And with how crazy things have been online. Like, I just want to make sure that people are being really careful with their, their assets with their data. Make a backup, keep backups try to be a little careful.

Don’t be careful. Like, I don’t know. I don’t wanna make those decisions for you. I’m scared. I’m scared for some of you. Oh, it’s happening. 

Sean: [00:10:12] If you can export anything about your business and have a backup for it that you could then apply it again somewhere else. Maybe you should think about doing it. Not saying anything’s going to happen, but it’s more of a insurance policy that you might as well 

Torie: [00:10:32] Because of all of this convenience, we’ve come to rely on. On a lot of companies, for example, QuickBooks, you used to be able to buy it and have a copy of it on your computer that you could just use. You owned a copy of QuickBooks. They don’t let you own a copy of QuickBooks anymore. Now it’s QuickBooks online. And to access your data, you have to use their system.

If they mess up your account. If something happens, if QuickBooks owner decides to go crazy. And the company gets canceled. Who knows guys, like your data has gone. Like, how are you going to get it? 

Sean: [00:11:12] Microsoft’s same way. 

Torie: [00:11:14] So when putting all of these things out there, like what would happen if QuickBooks blew up tomorrow? Like I’d have no accounting data. I don’t have all that stuff downloaded. Maybe I should, like, I think we all need to kind of take a little bit of inventory. Where is my data what’s going on with all my stuff. So my website, okay. My email list. Okay. My accounting, like, is there a backup of that is something if something did happen because man, guys, 

Sean: [00:11:44] It’s crazy better only to lose a portion of it, then.

Torie: [00:11:48] Absolutely. Everything. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen with some of these tech companies. Some of them might end up going under, I mean, parlor was gone. QuickBooks could be gone, like, who knows when that’s gonna happen. It could happen. Like we don’t really know. So take a look at all these places.

Even like, you know, we have stuff in Dropbox, like what if Dropbox like fell off the world tomorrow? Like all of our files are there. 

Sean: [00:12:11] Really? What if, what if it was hacked and the hacker just deleted everything? No fault of any business, like it just, some douchebag came in and thought they’d be funnier. Whatever the case may be. Yeah, I bet you wish you’d had a backup then. 

Torie: [00:12:29] Yeah, I suppose there could be any type of attacks, but that even, you know, hackers could take down lots of different things and some stuff, you guys, some stuff when it’s gone, it’s gone. Like it’s not coming back. So what kind of assets do you have out there?

Where is your data? Do you own your data? Are you putting too much? Eggs in one basket, like some Facebook type stuff you enter into some type of social media platform. These are, these are some, some weird times and I just really want business owners to take care of themselves and be careful with where their business is going and not let something, you know, frivolous like this, like just not making a backup affect their business from growing or losing clients.

These are some weird-ass times. Nobody ever thought that like the government was shut down all these businesses other things could happen and it’s, it’s time for everybody to kind of just be aware of what’s going on and not think that these businesses are looking out for your best interest or that they’re going to be here tomorrow or that you might get kicked off of something either accidentally like the Facebook ads, just randomly doing things or.

Because they decide they don’t want you on there anymore. Cause you can see now that it could definitely happen. So be careful. 

So if you liked this episode, give us a, like subscribe to our channel or subscribe to our podcasts. We have all of our shows, both on YouTube as videos or on most podcast software.

So wherever you like to listen, or watch your videos, we’ve got them there. Yeah. And stuff. Yeah.

We’ll see you on the next one. 

Sean: [00:14:10] Oh boy, yes. 

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