In the future, one thing is certain.

Someone’s going to drive it.

Someone’s going to collect it.

Someone’s going to lie on it. Sit on it. Sleep on it.

Drink too much German beer on it.

Someone will sit in front row seats, here, here and here.

Someone will land it. Someone will save it. Someone will find it. Then get happily lost in it.

Someone will sleep five stars, someone will sleep under the stars.

Someone will ski down it, fly over it, and scream across it.

Beautiful things will still be made in the future. Someone is going to buy them.

Someone’s going to walk it. Someone is going to ride it.

And at the end of the day, someone’s going to watch it.

And there’s no reason why that someone can’t be you.

Since 1849, AMP has helped more Australians own their tomorrows.

Own tomorrow. AMP.

Emotive as it was, it is also, of course, absolute hogwash — GFC or no!

Someone once told this story:

A rich man once thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

He decided, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

But God said to the man, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

You don’t own your tomorrow. It’s not even yours today. The Bible says there is one good kind of storing up to be done — I can “store up God’s word in my heart, that I might not sin against Him.” (Ps 119:11) — yet I still fail and need to fall upon His mercy.

The man who told that story was Jesus. (Luke 12:16–20) He promises peace and a greater security than all the riches of the world.

Own eternal life. Jesus.

It’s frustrating, because it’s self-inflicted, relatively fixable, and a prime example of terrible stewardship on my part. It trickles out of my account in minor transactions of around $20, and I just don’t miss the money as much as I should. The problem is, if the transfer gets screwed up, various people dependent particularly on email (less so websites — they can withstand being down for a period of time, but for most clients of mine email is THE crucial application) cease to function until the DNS mends itself.

For this reason, I’ve not been brave (foolish?) enough to entrust the task to a service such as ODesk or RentACoder, even though either has the potential to totally take the headache away for a pretty minimal cost. I know that the odds of something going wrong between the exposure of core hosting passwords to strangers, in a process that is the web equivalent of a heart bypass, are pretty unacceptably high to simply palm off to some stranger for a chunk of change. Part of the problem is the kind of business continuity capabilities faced by many of my clients aren’t such that service notifications provide any particular benefit: it’s not as though they have any particular remedy for ‘scheduled maintenance’ in terms of notifying clients, as, unlike larger businesses, their websites are not frequently visited as first point of contact for vast numbers of existing and prospective clients of their own, and public apologies or notifications are meaningless.

Similarly, the scope of client education for such a minor undertaking is itself quite formidable — this sort of outage is highly occasional and the clients are so varied that there are no particular processes in place for dealing with it. Micro web agencies aren’t generally well equipped to do this sort of thing, simply as a byproduct of the nature of the provider/client relationship. In my work with larger businesses (especially where SaaS is a core offering) where the relationship is less provider/client and more embedded (i.e. I don’t end up functioning as an external party!) we have of course formulated plans for continuity and notification, but this cannot be the case as simply or readily for smaller, more fragmented organisations.

These issues have produced something of a perfect storm, where minor recurrent losses are the path of least resistance in a situation that requires a fair amount of (non-financial, tangible and intangible) investment to correct course. This, combined with the fact that I don’t have enough clients to justify writing migration code, and the general awfulness (particularly the glacial slowness)of WHM/other proprietary host management software, has meant I’ve yet to embark on an exercise with little visible benefit. Over 50% of this task is stuff you can’t outsource, or at least shouldn’t: client education and maintaining relationships.

Small business owners: how do you balance this need for process improvement and cost saving with the reality of day-to-day busyness and your obligations as a provider?

It was… very helpful, I think, in terms of perspective. The thing which struck me most about the talk was a reference made to 1 Chronicles 29:14–16:

1 Chronicles 29

¹⁴ “But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. ¹⁵ We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. ¹⁶ O LORD our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.

There’s a passage in the Old Testament, before Jesus came along, which instructs the people of Israel to give a tenth of all they get. One reference is Deuteronomy 26:11–13, which instructs them to “set… aside a tenth of all your produce” to give away.

Later on, in the New Testament, Jesus critcises the religious teachers of the day for being hypocritical in the way they’re following God’s law. In Luke 11:42, Jesus says “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.” Obviously, Jesus is critical of the religious teachers (Pharisees) here… so, how much should we give?

The Chronicles passage quoted above puts everything in perspective for me. Contextually, this is being written just after a great temple has been built for God by the Israelites… the Israelites giving so that this could happen. But King David says “Who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you…”

So, everything comes from God. Okay. This is the killer bit: “…we have given only what comes from your hand.” The translation I’m using doesn’t put exclamation marks after that statement, but I think there should be. They’re not really giving anything! Everything they (and, consequently, we) have was given to them by the Lord — it already belonged to him!

This really changes the way that I think about everything… it’s not as though I would be giving 10%; I’d be keeping 90%.

“It comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.”