When our office flooded — twice — we learned key lessons in disaster recovery, preparedness, and why cloud servers are better than on-premise.
Sirens.
The fire brigade breaks into the Yonder office.
Police are on site.
It wasn’t what you think. No fire, no crime. It was a leaking water boiler, spreading 600 liters of water per hour through our office, into the hollow floor, through the Tae Kwan Do studio below us, waterfalling down the staircase, and onto the open road. It happened on a public holiday, so nobody was in the office and some worried neighbors finally called the police when they saw the water pour out the front door.
It looks like the guy maintaining the water boiler did a poor job the day before, but more on that later.
When we returned to the office the day after, air dryers, wet carpets, and torn-down ceiling panels on the floor below our office dominated the scene. Working conditions were seriously degraded, but our resilient team kept going. The maintenance guys came back to fix the mess, and so did the landlord to assess the damage for insurance reporting.
At the end of the week, everything seemed fixed, and just the air dryers were left humming away for the weekend to get the place fully dry again.
Then, on the weekend: Sirens, the fire brigade breaks into the office, and police are on site.
You are correct. The maintenance guys screwed it up again, and the second flood wave was hammering the building. Back to square one.
Another week in degraded working conditions followed before the issue was finally settled.
What did we learn as a B2B SaaS company from this incident?
1. Act Early, Don’t React
We told our landlord for more than one year that the water boiler needed repair. We were put off numerous times, hearing that in other buildings they are managing the water boiler would have worked for 40 straight years.
Whilst this might be true, our water boiler showed signs of defect for more than one year. A repair or replacement would have been way easier and cheaper than managing the hassle and the cost of the two flood waves.
Resilient entrepreneurs invest in preparedness, not reaction. Life has too many unforeseen turns to throw at you, so you better prepare for everything you can foresee.
2. Employ Professionals
It’s an open secret that good craftsmen are scarce in today’s world where remote work, AI, and content creation are hyped — even in Switzerland with a formidable dual education system.
Well, two craftsmen “fixing” a water boiler in a way that it sends flood waves through an office complex just shows that the landlord is probably not just saving on new equipment, but also employing the cheapest craftsmen they can find. It would have been a lot cheaper to pay the true professionals rather than the insurance retainer fee.
It’s the same for our team: It pays off to pay for skills and experience.
3. Don’t Think Your Office Is Safe
Some of our customers still request on-premise hosting for our software. Technically this is feasible, and in some cases, it even makes sense — for example, in a defense setting where customers want to keep full control over server locations and technologies.
However, for the majority of the customers, cloud server storage is much safer than keeping servers on-premise. Yes, AWS or Microsoft Azure data centers might get flooded too, but by design, there aren’t any water boilers close to the server rooms, and those data centers are fully redundant.
4. Distribute
Since the end of the pandemic, we have been following a hybrid approach to work. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the entire Switzerland-based team comes to the office, and on the other days, they work from home, in the mountains, or from wherever. Furthermore, a significant part of our workforce is spread out between Phoenix and Singapore, bolstering our distributed setup.
But let’s be aware that a full distribution wouldn’t have worked in this real-life example: Somebody had to empty the air dryers twice a day, including the weekends.
It was the guy who lives right next to our office building.
