Is Your Small Business Prepared For Disaster?
You are a small business owner and you are probably an expert planner! Writing financial plans, business plans, marketing plans is par for the course.
Contingency planning is a whole other project however.
Do you have a disaster plan? Unpredictable weather and humans can strike at any time and it is never an opportune moment.
Weather it is violence, hacking or natural disasters like Katrina, the companies that thrive after a callamity likely had a plan in place.
Do you? Think about what the absolute minimal requirements are to get you up and running post disaster either on or off site.
Plan for your people, your cusotmers, your communications and data.
Are your employees and customers safe in the workplace? Are there basic first aid kits, emergency phone numbers, exit routes and do employees know where and what they are? Prepare for a "disgruntled employee" and look around to see if any particular spots in your business or employees are particularly vulnerable or exposed.
Are your doors card or code protected? If not, should they be? Do employees know where to go in case of a tornado or earthquake or something completely unexpected? Define your skeleton crew (each member should have a backup).
Who MUST be in place to keep the business running and who could step into that role if they were unable to return to the business? Staff members should be cross-trained in other roles.
As the business owner, do you have valuable files set up in a spot away from the physical business and an employee phone list at home? Be prepared to set up as many functions as possible.
Have a backup plan for communicating.
This includes individual cell phone numbers.
Talk to your telecommunications company about what would happen if phone lines went dead.
Is there a way to redirect your business line to your cell phone? Do your employees have an emergency cell phone number for you? We should all be doing this routinely anyway, especially with the cheap availability of cloud storage, but are your files backed up? This should include your customer lists, your financial data, website and blog files.
Backing up to a second hard drive won't help if your business burns down so do consider off-site backups like Box.
net or Google.
Along with your skeleton crew, hold twice annually disaster preparation meetings.
Make sure ALL employees are routinely advised of who is on this crew, what emergency numbers are, etc.
Send out an email after meetings to advice folks of this and encourage them to forward it to their home email addresses so they have access away from work.
A contingency or disaster plan can prevent your business from failing after a major disaster so it is as basic and as important as any business planning gets!
Contingency planning is a whole other project however.
Do you have a disaster plan? Unpredictable weather and humans can strike at any time and it is never an opportune moment.
Weather it is violence, hacking or natural disasters like Katrina, the companies that thrive after a callamity likely had a plan in place.
Do you? Think about what the absolute minimal requirements are to get you up and running post disaster either on or off site.
Plan for your people, your cusotmers, your communications and data.
Are your employees and customers safe in the workplace? Are there basic first aid kits, emergency phone numbers, exit routes and do employees know where and what they are? Prepare for a "disgruntled employee" and look around to see if any particular spots in your business or employees are particularly vulnerable or exposed.
Are your doors card or code protected? If not, should they be? Do employees know where to go in case of a tornado or earthquake or something completely unexpected? Define your skeleton crew (each member should have a backup).
Who MUST be in place to keep the business running and who could step into that role if they were unable to return to the business? Staff members should be cross-trained in other roles.
As the business owner, do you have valuable files set up in a spot away from the physical business and an employee phone list at home? Be prepared to set up as many functions as possible.
Have a backup plan for communicating.
This includes individual cell phone numbers.
Talk to your telecommunications company about what would happen if phone lines went dead.
Is there a way to redirect your business line to your cell phone? Do your employees have an emergency cell phone number for you? We should all be doing this routinely anyway, especially with the cheap availability of cloud storage, but are your files backed up? This should include your customer lists, your financial data, website and blog files.
Backing up to a second hard drive won't help if your business burns down so do consider off-site backups like Box.
net or Google.
Along with your skeleton crew, hold twice annually disaster preparation meetings.
Make sure ALL employees are routinely advised of who is on this crew, what emergency numbers are, etc.
Send out an email after meetings to advice folks of this and encourage them to forward it to their home email addresses so they have access away from work.
A contingency or disaster plan can prevent your business from failing after a major disaster so it is as basic and as important as any business planning gets!
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