Everyone’s heard the phrase, “Small business owners wear a lot of hats.”

True, but security guard?

Last night my business partner called me around 11pm, just as I was getting ready to call it a day. The alarm company had just contacted him; the alarm in our office had gone off and they had dispatched the police. My partner asked me to go check it out (I live 10 minutes away.)

This has happened before (all false alarms as far as we could tell) but off I went into the cold, dark and drizzly night, hair tussled, eyelids heavy, to see if there were bad guys rooting around in my office.

When I arrived at the building everything looked OK. The cops weren’t there. I called my partner back, asked him to contact the alarm company and find out if the cops were in fact coming. He called back in a few minutes and told me that the police had come, but since everything looked OK from the outside of the building and you need special keys to get in, they left. And, the alarm had only been tripped for less than 1 second; the front door contact had been broken and reset almost immediately. So it was likely a false alarm. Why the first agent at the alarm company didn’t tell my partner that information is beyond me.

So, being a brave little business owner, I trudged through the dark, empty building to my office. Although pictures ran through my head of being stabbed by some drugged-up lunatic thief, I knew the odds were good that it was a false alarm. The door was locked. I went in, turned on some lights, looked into each office and there was…

Nothing.

The office was empty (of bad guys that is.) All the computer equipment was in place and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

It was a false alarm. Phew. No bandits to wrestle with!

I went home and went to bed. End of story.

That’s what being a small business owner is all about …wearing every single hat.

More importantly, it shows you that being a small business owner / entrepreneur is all about handling unexpected situations.