Try to Leave Before You Have To

Here is a test you can run in ten minutes that will tell you more about who owns your business than any contract you signed.

Try to leave.

Not actually leave. Just try. Go into whatever platform holds your customers, your content and your pictures, and attempt to walk out with all three in a form you can open on your own computer.

Time it. Write down what you got.

Most people have never done this. They find out on the worst possible day.

Why the worst day is the wrong day to find out

The day you need your export is not a calm day.

It is the day your account got flagged. The day a page came down. The day the price tripled, or the vendor got bought, or the guy who set it all up stopped answering.

That is the day people discover the download button hands them a PDF of their own data instead of a file. Or that the photos come out thumbnail sized. Or that there is no export at all and support says they will pass the feedback along.

You cannot negotiate from inside a burning building.

So run the drill cold, on a Tuesday, when nothing is wrong.

The three things, and what a pass looks like

Your people. Every contact, lead and subscriber, with the fields that matter: name, email, phone, when they came in, where they came from, what they asked about.

A pass is a spreadsheet file you can open. A fail is a screen you have to look at, a report you have to request, or an export that drops the source and the date and hands you a naked list of email addresses. A list with no context is a list you cannot follow up on, which means it is barely a list.

Your words. Every post, page and article, as text.

A pass is files. A fail is a database backup only that vendor can read, or a copy and paste job one page at a time. If moving your writing means retyping your writing, you do not have your writing.

Your pictures. Full size originals, not the compressed versions the platform serves to visitors.

A pass is a folder. A fail is right clicking six hundred images off your own website at whatever size the page happened to load them.

Three for three in ten minutes is ownership. Anything less is a countdown you cannot see.

What people get wrong about this

They think it is about distrust.

It is not. I use other people's software every day and I am glad it exists. Nobody is out here building their own payment processor. The point is not to avoid vendors. The point is to know in advance, and in writing, exactly what you keep on the day you and a vendor stop agreeing.

There is a second mistake. People run the export once, at setup, and call it handled. Then two years of customers pile up in a tool nobody has tested since.

Run it quarterly. Put it on the calendar like a fire drill, because that is what it is.

The part that costs you money

Here is what I have watched happen more than once.

Somebody builds an audience for five years on a platform. The platform changes. Reach drops, or the rules move, or the account goes sideways. And the whole five years is stuck on the other side of a wall, because the relationship was never theirs.

They were never the customer. They were the inventory.

An email address you own is worth more than a follower you rent. Not because email is magic. Because nobody gets to stand between you and it.

So the drill is not really about files. It is about which relationships survive a bad week.

Do it today

Pick the platform holding the most of your business. Set a timer for ten minutes. Go get your people, your words and your pictures.

Whatever you cannot get out in ten minutes is the first thing to fix.