On July 29, 2025, my home was destroyed by fire. It was deliberately set, and the person responsible has since pleaded guilty. Because the criminal case has not yet reached sentencing, I’m going to leave the circumstances there. What I can talk about is what happened after the fire.
My daughter and I were displaced immediately. My home office was gone. All of our belongings were either damaged, inaccessible, or lost. At the same time, Erawatech still had clients, projects, support requests, deadlines, and all of the ordinary responsibilities of running a small business.
There wasn’t a clean line between dealing with a personal crisis and running the company. Both were happening at the same time.
Resilience
I used to think of resilience mostly as the ability to recover from something difficult. I think about it differently now.
Resilience does not mean that something terrible happens and you simply keep going as if it didn’t. Sometimes your capacity changes. Sometimes you work more slowly. Sometimes things that seemed important a week earlier suddenly are not important at all. For me, resilience was much more practical than inspirational.
It was figuring out what had to happen next. It was getting my daughter settled somewhere safe. Replacing the equipment I needed to work. Keeping client sites running. Answering the next email. Solving the next problem. Then doing it again the next day.
I was also reminded that business relationships are still human relationships. A number of clients knew what had happened. They were patient when I needed patience and flexible when I needed flexibility. I won’t forget that.
Redundancy
For years, I have talked with clients about backups, reliable hosting, cloud storage, account recovery, documentation, and avoiding single points of failure.
After the fire, none of that felt theoretical anymore.
Erawatech did not depend on the computer sitting in my office or on the office itself. Client websites were hosted elsewhere. My files were available from the cloud. Passwords and accounts could be accessed from another machine. Most of the systems I use to run the business could follow me wherever I happened to be working.
I still had to rebuild a workspace. I did not have to rebuild the company. That is a meaningful difference.
Most redundancy is boring when everything is working correctly. Nobody gets excited about backups, documentation, recovery options, or a well-configured hosting environment. You notice their value when something fails.
You really notice their value when something disappears entirely.
I also learned that redundancy is not purely technical. It is having people you trust. It is having clients who understand that sometimes life does not respect a project schedule. It is having another option when the original plan stops being available.
Starting Again
People often talk about “getting back to normal” after a major disruption. I’m not sure that is how it works.
Some things go back to the way they were. Others don’t. Eventually you build something that works around the circumstances that exist now.
Over the past year I have worked from temporary housing, borrowed spaces, coworking spaces, and wherever else I could put together a computer, an internet connection, and enough quiet to get something done.
And the business kept moving. Websites launched. Problems got solved. Clients called. Projects moved forward.
My daughter found stability again. Slowly, things became recognizable. Not exactly the same as before. Recognizable.
The experience changed the way I think about business continuity.
Most contingency planning focuses on predictable failures: a server goes down, a laptop dies, someone loses a password, or a vendor has an outage. Those things matter. But occasionally the disruption is something you never would have put into a contingency plan because it seemed too unlikely.
You cannot prepare specifically for every possible crisis. What you can do is avoid building systems that depend on everything going right.
- You can keep backups.
- You can eliminate unnecessary single points of failure.
- You can document things.
- You can build relationships.
- You can give yourself more than one way forward.
That is what redundancy does. And after the last year, that is probably the most useful definition of resilience I have found as well: having enough options left to keep moving when the original plan is gone.
More than anything, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for the people who helped my daughter and me through the worst of it, for the clients who gave me patience and trust, and for the systems that allowed Erawatech to keep functioning when almost everything else in our lives had been disrupted.
For years, Erawatech’s tagline has been Make peace with technology. I have always meant that technology should make life easier, more reliable, and less stressful – not become one more thing you have to fight with. After this past year, that idea means something a little different to me. Good technology cannot prevent the worst things from happening. But when it is built thoughtfully, it can give you one less thing to worry about while you deal with everything else.
I’m also deeply grateful for the organizations that help people through situations like this. In Dane County, Domestic Abuse Intervention Services (DAIS) provides support, advocacy, and resources for people affected by domestic violence. The American Red Cross of Wisconsin also provides disaster relief and recovery assistance, including help after home fires. If you ever find yourself needing either kind of support, those are two resources worth knowing about.
