Disaster Ready

What Would Happen to Your Business…
If there were a flood, tornado, theft or fire?
Most businesses have replacement insurance to help with rebuilding the bricks and mortar or buying news desks and computers should disaster strike, and at Professional Benefit Solutions, LLC, we always recommend an annual thorough review to assure that the type and amount of coverage you have will replace your office should the worst happen. BUT what most businesses have not done is to develop a Business Disaster Plan that would protect the data on your servers and computers or the hard copy files and even your inventory should disaster strike.
Most well-developed Business Emergency Plans create back up secure file storage at least 200 miles away from your storefront. In most of cases this keeps your files far enough away to survive a disaster in your operations location. That should also include all the policy information for the various insurance policies you have for your building and contents as well as Human Resources files, payroll and the internal documents that you will need to restart work. It also includes client and customer files for both current business contacts and prospective clients.
Your Business Disaster Plan also should examine what your people will do in the event of an emergency. Where they will go and what they will evacuate with if there is any warning at all. For example, your staff may be told to exit a certain doorway, but will they leave with the external hard drive or laptop? If you have preparation time, do your human resources have responsibilities to help move files to a more secure location, move inventory to higher areas of the building?
How quickly you recover and get your business running efficiently again depends on how well you have planned to secure it during a disaster. And that means that there should be a plan for who and how you call people back to work once the disaster ends. Do you have people designated to check your building for safety and begin the process of ramping back up? And do you have a temporary site that would work as your headquarters if your building needs major repairs?
Your Business Disaster Plan, just like your routine fire drills, should be practiced so that people learn to work together in safe and quick ways to make provisions for keeping your business viable once the disaster has passed.