How to prepare your business for disaster

• Immediate benefits
• Against more imminent threats
• At more affordable costs
• While building resilience to the more serious, but less likely, threats

This is a completely different approach from being paralyzed by a focus on the catastrophic. And yet it is exactly the approach that protects your business from the catastrophic. I know because I put this approach into practice myself. My small business was located in the “Zone 1” of the World Trade Center on 9-11. My business is still up and running and in fact, because of its exceptional level of readiness, it is profiled in the “Ready for Business” campaign of the Department of Homeland Security.

The following are three tips to get you started in crafting your own disaster preparedness plan:

1. Start by identifying the critical assets of your business. For a restaurant, for example, it is location, location, location. So a civil emergency that would impede pedestrian access would cause your business to lose revenues. For an accounting firm, a critical asset might be the safety and security of client financial records.

2. Think about how you might protect the business against that risk. For the restaurant example, business interruption insurance would be important to replace lost revenues. For the accounting firm, secure data backups are especially important.

3. Think about inexpensive ways to build in redundancy. One recommendation I have, for example, is the buddy system, a small business with which you could co-located hardware and have reciprocal access to one another’s offices during periods of disruption. This would give you redundant office space without the expense of paying a second lease. Of course, you would choose a buddy who is not a competitor in your industry.

And this framework is not limited just to Lower Manhattan post-9/11; it is universally applicable. Consider the experience of small businesses in the U.S. Gulf Coast. I recently returned from New Orleans where I delivered a training workshop to a local small business assistance group. The executive director told me of one of her clients who had, after painstaking effort had rebuilt his business from the losses inflicted by Hurricane Katrina. He was enjoying the winter, although he knew that the hurricane season would return again and he would again face the possibility of severe natural disasters. But he never had that opportunity, because his business burned to the ground in the off-season. He had not put data backups in place, because he was watching the hurricane calendar and thought that time was on his side. (I heard a very similar story about a Canadian small business after Newfoundland had been evacuated when Hurricane Juan moved up the Atlantic Ocean.) So the key message here is: prepare for the everyday disaster and this approach will address the more serious, and less likely, threats. And if you need additional information, check out the free resources available on my website at www.preparedsmallbusiness.com.