Spend two hours setting things up properly now, or spend twenty hours fixing them when things go wrong. One of the most common issues we see right now isn't bad marketing, poor websites, or ineffective advertising. It's businesses losing access to their own digital assets when trying to improve their presence online. Typical scenarios include: - An employee sets up your social media accounts and then leaves and they are the owners of the account. - An agency creates your advertising accounts under their ownership. - A domain is registered years ago under an email address nobody uses anymore. Everything works perfectly... until it doesn't. Then suddenly you're trying to prove ownership of your own business to Meta, Google, a domain registrar, or a former supplier. We've seen businesses spend days, sometimes weeks, trying to recover access to accounts that should have been under their control all along. My point of view on a few simple best practices can save you a few headaches: • Ensure your business is the primary owner of all key digital assets. • Give staff and agencies access, not primary ownership. • Keep accounts registered under your organisation's name, not a person. • Use a generic business email address that is unlikely to be closed down for ownership and recovery, not an individual's email. • Have at least one trusted backup administrator where appropriate. • Document where everything lives and who has access in a secure place. One example that has always stuck with me involved a business with more than 200 staff operating in a critical environment. Over time, their internal IT function was outsourced. The email address associated with their domain registration was no longer active, and the knowledge of where the domain was registered had been lost. No one received the renewal notices. The domain expired. The website, with critical information being sent to it went offline. Emails stopped working. Internal systems that relied on the domain failed. The business effectively ground to a halt. It took hours to locate the domain, prove ownership, and regain control. The disruption cost thousands of dollars and created unnecessary risks that could have been far worse. The scary part, was not that it was also 5pm on a Friday, like that was really rough, but; This isn't unusual. As Kiwis, we're generally trusting people. We assume things have been set up correctly and that someone else has it covered. Until they don't. My two cents: take an hour this month and audit your digital assets. Make sure you know what you own, where it is, who controls it, and how to access it. Future you will be very grateful. 🤞