Entrepreneur: Critical Stuff
by Miki Saxon
Entrepreneurs have a lot on their minds; they’re famous for multitasking; they’re usually shorthanded; they wear many hats and do whatever is necessary to turn their vision into a reality.
Few admit it, but with all this action stuff is bound to slip through the cracks now and then.
The trick is to be sure that what slips isn’t critical.
Of course, it still happens—even to big companies with lots of people to focus on the details.
Stuff slips because everyone thinks it’s in someone else’s job description or because it’s so basic and so important that there’s a subconscious assumption that it’s been taken care of.
Stuff such as domain registration.
Hard to believe, but domain lapse* seems to happen to everybody from super-hot startups, Foursquare in 2010, to government, New Jersey Transit in 2011.
An early casualty was Hotmail in 1999, while Disney’s Club Penguin was just last week.
The Washington Post and Gawker made 2004 the year for both old and new media to slip.
There’s a simple, low-tech solution to avoiding critical slips; it won’t stop them all slips, but it will stop critical.
It’s called a whiteboard, but the trick is not to use dry erase pens.
Instead use a permanent marker and list nothing on it except critical items, such as domain renewal dates.
Identifying what goes on the board is simple, too.
“Critical stuff” encompasses those things without which there is no company.
*Source: Bloomberg Business Week, June 27, 2011 (print edition)
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28288673@N07/4848301878/
