I am always amazed by the amount of politics involved in business. Think of the businesses that your business can’t survive without. Now think for a moment of the businesses that can’t survive without yours.

Take the company or product that you rely the most on. Now imagine that they are completely gone. They vanished overnight and there is absolutely no trace of them whatsoever. Their service is no longer available and your running out of time before your shareholders, and more importantly your customers begin to notice.

I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m about to ask already, but here it is regardless… “WHAT DO YOU DO NOW????”

Anyone with an entrepreneur’s mindset can tell you what must be done. Whatever it takes. It is up to you to make things work. Find alternatives, but don’t just look at the former company’s competition, there are all kinds of solutions you could be looking at.

Is this something that you can afford to do yourself? While that’s not always a financially feasible option, imagine for a second the market control that you could potentially obtain. Being as we said this is a rather important aspect of your business, something that you really rely on, let’s assume the likely scenario that you are not quite able to afford this. So what’s the plan now?

How about your network? I’m talking about both your personal contacts and your business’s professional contacts. The event of a company with a valuable disappearing off of the map (although rare!!) would not only be devastating to you, but also to your competitors and your partners. It’s fair to assume that YOUR competition isn’t going to sit around. It’s all about results and numbers.

So before you let yourself drown while wallowing in your own self pity, come up with some sort of plan. Can you be the one who unites everyone? I talked about having your company take over the service, but that could be expensive to your business. That however doesn’t mean that your network as a whole can’t arrange something where everyone benefits. And if the new service is owned by people who rely on it, you no are no longer subject to the whims of some unreliable company.

Now I’m not saying that you should wait around until some company that’s making money suddenly decides to disband before you can take action. It’s all about networking and politics. Who can help you get ahead and at the same time you can help get ahead?

One quick example is my friend Shay over at Sparkplugged.net, he is able to help me out with my weak area, web design. And meanwhile I am able to help him out with technical aspects of his site. By trading knowledge we can both get ahead. And more importantly, trust is developed between the two of us.

Both of the web-pages for Aridni and Sparkplugged are hosted by the same company and even on the same server. If for some reason there was a problem with the hosting (it’s been great so far, knock on wood!) by having two of us, we wield more power if something should occur. Granted it’s not a whole lot more, but what if our network a good portion of the people from the host! That would be a fair amount of influence. (note: I’m really happy with my host but it’s a relevant example here where a network could help build a great alliance )

Now it would be just awful to be caught off guard and need the network that you don’t have built up yet. If somebody doesn’t know you, they certainly won’t be inclined to help you out. If you haven’t even gained trust from someone, they have little incentive to offer you favors. So get out there and start recruiting your allies! What kind of trades can you offer? Remember both sides must benefit!