One of the keys to making your new business a success is constant vigilance. As soon as you think things are running smoothly... and you relax just a little... you'll likely get a wake-up call. Something will happen to remind you that there is no time to ease up. It may be a new hire that managed to ship bad product to your best customer. It could be the IRS discovering you owe some unemployment taxes from 3 years ago. Maybe a key vendor shut down for 2 weeks and forgot to tell you. These and any number of other "glitches" can clobber an otherwise great day!

For established companies with sufficient financial and goodwill buffers, these types of problems can be taken care off with minimal impact to the company. Your small business, however, may be put in real jeopardy from any of the above situations.

How would you handle the three situations I mentioned in the first paragraph? Here are some suggestions:

Be sure that any new hire is given sufficient training. More important, they must be made to understand that shipping bad product is much worse than shipping no product. If this person is the last person to inspect it before your customer inspects it, then be sure this person is comfortable questioning everything and is not intimidated by other persons or by pressure to get shipments out.

When dealing with the IRS, the worst thing you can do is ignore their letters. While it may seem that they exist just to drive you out of business, they are just doing their job. Remember, if you are new and small, they probably have no idea who you are, what your situation is or what you do. Usually it does the government no good if you go out of business. Assuming your employees and your company are paying their taxes, then your failure means revenue loss to the government. If they discover that you owe back taxes for whatever reason, read the pamphlet that comes with the tax notice and choose one of the options. But don't ignore them!

Know thy vendor and thy vendor's vacation schedule. It's not unusual for companies to shut down so that everyone can take their vacation at the same time. Hopefully they will let you know with plenty of time, especially if you do regular business with them. But it's best to ask just in case.

Try to deal with the unexpected quickly. Take action based on the information you have and your best instincts. When successful, file away the experience for future reference.