One of the greatest joys of being a small businessman is the freedom to dictate your own working hours, holidays and working arrangement. But this freedom is deceptive.
You may be free from the joys (or otherwise) of having a boss, someone who you need to square off everything with, but you are not really free at all. You become a slave to the business, it becomes your master (or mistress), you become addicted to serving this faceless monster. When you are parted, you even suffer withdrawal symptoms.
Of late, I've been very busy setting up my latest dot.com venture. It's a niche market publisher whose first site, PinkNews.co.uk, a service aimed at the gay community, has grown phenomenally over the past few months. Working on a new business is rather like starting a new romance. During the first few months you eagerly spend every waking moment together, experimenting with new concepts and changing your lifestyle around to suit him or her.
Imagine my shock when I woke up one morning three weeks ago barely being able to see. I could sense PinkNews.co.uk crying out for me, urging me to log on, to edit some articles and approve some advertisers. The problem was, while the heart was willing, the mind was not.
As time passed, my vision improved, I was able to see my beloved website again. However, as if urging me to get back to the real world and ditch all this dot.com nonsense, my left arm, hand and leg stopped talking to my brain. I could see them but I couldn't feel them.
In the end, I found myself stranded in Barnet General Hospital, it being the closest source of help to my parents' home in north London where I had been staying to convalese on (vegetarian) chicken soup and the other delights of a good Jewish mother.
I worried how I would communicate to my users and clients that I was out of action. I fretted about how the site would not be updated and their calls left unanswered. I cried out for a wireless network that I could log into and solve these problems.
Eventually, I summoned up the courage to call my sister (despite the hospital's ban on mobiles) and asked her to log-on to the administration consol of PinkNews.co.uk and gently inform my legions of readers that the site would be down for a few days.
In my haste to serve this new business, I had forgotten to take on any staff, so I had no one else to turn to when the going got tough.
As I tried to recover, my phone vibrated against my working right leg. My sister, Danielle, told me the bad news: "I think I crashed the website," she said, clearly concerned that the news might not be the best thing to aid my recovery.
"It's saying error, I don't know what to do, who should I call?"
I began to wonder whether her impending degree in economics from the LSE would be a waste if she couldn't manage to click a website's "update" button properly.*
On returning home from hospital, having found out that I am suffering from two lesions on the right hand side of my brain, I realised how much easier it would have been if I hadn't tried to run the business alone.
However, there is a way around this and it's actually quite simple. It involves drawing up a plan of action that a third party can initiate if you're ever unable to work on your business. In my case the plan lists simple instructions to my father about how to automatically redirect all my telephone calls to a call answering service, who will text me messages and inform callers that I'm indisposed, instructions on how to forward web traffic to a temporary holding page and a tool to automatically reply to e-mails explaining the situation.
These delaying tactics would easily have helped in my case and there are scores of companies who specialise in "business continuity" for sole traders and small businesses. I think, being able to know that your "baby" (or business) is in safe hands, will definitely speed up a recovery.
* Editorial note: Benjamin Cohen's sister has asked Times Online to point out that despite any implication to the contrary, she did not crash his website and that she does indeed know how to use a refresh button.
