Business details
Registered company no. 11869849
VAT number 317720513
This story is hard to place on a timeline, so randomly it sits here. The scenario is the early days of the Internet. Online presence is needed, the technical guys know that but the business is not really quite ready.
As can happen at times, initiative is taken in 1996 and the correct .com domain name purchased, alongside some hosting and a holding page setup. Something just temporary whilst the rest of the company stumbles forwards trying to grapple with this new Internet thing.
Where things go wrong here is that John, who took the initiative, purchased the domain using his company credit card putting himself down as the owner and contact point. It all seems quite logical really as John also runs the internal DNS systems, so it is almost a natural fit.
What John couldn’t predict was three years later with the online presence starting to perform a useful function, he moved on to another job somewhere else.
The domain came up for renewal as per normal, billing John’s credit card. Which no longer existed. The domain ownership did not get renewed. The company presence was lost. For quite a while.
Learning point for everyone:
Don’t do this! Make sure that you have a more generic approach to handling not just domain names but hosting, cloud services, certificates, licenses anything in fact that expires and requires renewals.Most businesses have learnt this lesson but I am also very aware that the smaller the business, the more likely it is that costs for these things are just coming in as expenses on credit cards. If it must be a credit card, make it a generic business one and be sure about where you need to go to in order to update those details when the card expires.
To me this comes down to good asset management and an accurate rolling schedule of tasks required to handle those assets, on a clear timeline. IT should be predictable and boring. When IT is predictable and boring, it becomes manageable. When it is manageable you will have more time for the exciting new things we all really want to do and need to do continually to evolve the businesses and adapt to new and more efficient ways of operating.
Registered company no. 11869849
VAT number 317720513