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Have you ever read about other people's troubles on some of the webmaster boards out there and think that, whatever the problem they were dealing with, it could never happen to you?

You know the sort of problems I mean ... hassles with their banks ... problems with sponsors ... even problems with servers ... the problems that sound as though the person who is facing the dilemma may have become a little careless and somehow brought the problem on themselves ... or perhaps made it even worse by not being prepared.

If you're like me you'll think that those problems could never happen to you because you're too careful. You make sure that those sort of problems don't arise because you don't cut any corners.

Well, on the weekend one of those problems happened to me. We were up early because we had to drive a heap of miles to collect one of our kids and her daughter and bring them back here.

We stopped at our regular café for coffee and then went round the corner to a bank to grab some extra cash just in case we needed it. Of course our banks don't open on Saturdays but there was the automatic teller machine and our ePassporte card so we could withdraw some cash for the trip.

But at the point in the transaction where the cash should have been dispensed from the automatic teller all I got was an apology on the screen telling me that there had been a fault with the cash dispenser and my card was returned.

Ok, so we had plenty of cash with us so we decided not to try anywhere else ... we just headed out of town. On Sunday we went grocery shopping and I put my card into another automatic teller machine in another part of town. Once again, no cash but I did get a message telling me that the no-cash problem was caused by there being insufficient funds in my account.

Stress levels began to rise and we went home to check the account balance online. That's when I found that the transaction that failed to deliver any cash the day before had been deducted from my account.

Nice ... a substantial amount of cash had been deducted from my account but not delivered by that automatic teller the day before.

I'm sure that sometime in the next few months it will be resolved ... and yes, because we're not in the United States and I was using a third-party bank's automatic teller, this really could take several months to resolve ... but that's not the point. The point is that I never thought this would happen to me.

So let's all collectively pull our heads out of the sand and wake up to the fact that bad things that happen to other people ... bad things that we never thought would ever happen to us ... can and will happen to us.

Once we've accepted the fact that bad things can happen to us no matter how much care we take then we need to start deciding which of those bad things that can happen to us can have the most detrimental impact on our business.

If you're serious about your business you should have already looked carefully at the way your business functions and identified every spot in your business processes where there is a single point of failure ... a point where, if something goes wrong then your business grinds to a halt. And of course once you should have made sure that there were work-arounds in place for those single points of failure.

If you haven't looked at your business and identified those single points of failure or haven't established those work-arounds then you certainly should ... right now!

And of course you should now be looking at all those possible problems that you dismissed simply because they could never happen to you. As I said a moment ago ... bad things can happen to every one of us and if we haven't prepared for them then it's our fault when they do occur and our business collapses.

Of course there are some problems that you simply cannot foresee but there are plenty of others that we just think will never happen. We need to face the possibility that they will happen to us and we need to have plans in place that we can turn into action when things do go wrong.

Being in business for yourself is all about making money by producing whatever the product is that generates an income for us and it's also about being prepared to survive the worst-case scenario should it ever happen.

Will you and your business survive if the worst-case scenario should happen in the next five minutes?