Brief Guide To Protect Your Business after a Disaster

Brief Guide To Protect Your Business after a Disaster:

Before starting any business, every responsible human always thinks about upcoming risks and proper planning to overcome these risks. This is necessary to cover the risks to avoid difficulties that happen after the disaster.

You can cover your business’s loss with a good insurance policy. You can secure your business assets human resources by a good security system. As a good businessman, it’s your core responsibility to arrange a proper security system for your business and staff.

Two core types of disasters can harm your business, are the following:

1. Natural Disasters

A natural disaster is a tragic situation that occurs without the intervention of humans. For example, earthquake, land sliding, floods, blizzard. Although these disasters have different intensity country to country and its impact on the economy is significant always.

Some worse effects of natural disasters on business are:

Supply chain disruptions

An efficient supply chain is the backbone of every business. Most of the time, natural disasters disrupt supply chains by effecting roads, bridges, and airports. Due to impassable roads and closed airport movements of goods are stopped. In affected areas, factories would have stop production due to the non-availability of raw material.

Communication Barriers

Natural disasters damage power stations, cell towers, and other communication lines, resulting in a huge communication barrier that severely affects business operations. In this situation, you must have a good business continuity plan to overcome the risk of loss.

If there is no backup communication source available to communicate with your employees, customers, and suppliers, it will also be a big cause of discontinuity.

Building Damages

If we checked the USA’s history in 2017, a wildfire destroyed more than 8600 buildings in northern California, and most of them are business premises. These businesses got heavy losses while repairing due to loss of revenue and repairing cost.

The building is a core requirement of every business setup, so if the building is damaged. There is not also available any backup plan; your business process must be stopped. Also, there is no chance to reopen soon, a long time required to maintain building damages.

Because massive investment required while repairing fixed assets, and most businesses have not budgeted to reinvest massive amounts in rebuilding their premises. To avoid this kind of situation, you can get services from insurance companies also to diversify the risk elements of heavy losses.

 

Human Losses

It’s a non-recoverable loss when people lost their lives during natural disasters. In New Orleans and other areas of Gulf Coast, 1833 people have died in the flooding. Most of these people are employees of different organizations across the country; thus, companies lost their many valuable employees. And some are also injured.

There will also be a backup plan required to work in place of employees who lost their lives during disasters.

Loss of Customers

It’s obvious that people move away from affected areas in these situations, and they spent most of their resources on rebuilding home and business. Due to this situation, some most of the industries like entertainment and tourism lost their clients.

If your customer is a middle man like retailers, who purchase your products and sell to the final consumer through his own business. Then there are also chances his own workplace is destroyed during these disasters.

2. Social disasters

These disasters are related to human involvement, such as the disturbance of law and order situations, fraud, and theft. Although its effects are most timeless than natural disasters, there is a risk always which cannot be ignored.

 

How You Can Cover the Risk Of Loss Due to Above-Discussed Disasters.

Taking care of your Business

Most of the small businesses believe that insurance is not necessary for their business because it’s expensive. While preparing their business budget, they do not consider the cost of insurance, thinking that they cannot bear it due to low-income resources.

You should decide whether the cost of insurance to protect your business assets is easy to pay, or you can manage it yourself in case of disaster. Another question, is your small business can replace heavy budget damage items from pocket? If the answer is not, it means you newly start a business and are not able to bear the cost of replacement and repair of damaged assets.

So, insurance is the best solution to protect business assets if you want to cover the risk of your business. A good security system is also an option of safety. There are always chances of disaster and looting. So always do proper preparation for survival.

Crime and Punishment

When a community suffers from a natural disaster or civil law and order situation, criminal persons belong to that community to start looting and take advantage of these situations by taking cover of panic.

In these types of situations, the tour team must be prepared to save valuable assets from criminals. Many companies make proper plans and trained their employees about these situations now a day. There are also proper security systems installed by businesses to save their valuables from looting.

There are many groups on social media to plan to overcome the risk of looting with proper actions. Most of the time, the police arrive after the looting, and there is nothing to arrest unless they sold out these assets. Sometimes these illegal sales become the reason for tracing original criminals. There are high chances you will get nothing of your equipment. And As a result, you have to bear a considerable replacement cost, which becomes the reason for bankruptcy.

While looking online, you may find much strange guidance from different sites like shootout criminals while looting, and there is no legal restriction on this action. This is an extreme reaction this not part of any fair protocol to shootout someone while steeling. Always find the right step to protect your business during looting and after also.

Security system

A good security system provides many options to secure business. For example, an all-weather security camera provides alert to a security company, and the police department will also be contacted on time by a security officer. As a result, the Police department covers our place timely to save your valuable assets from looting.

Insurance Packages

By investing in small insurance packages like small business insurance, general liability insurance, staff insurance, and insurance of automobiles in business use, you can easily restart your business after disaster situations. There are many sites to help business owners to make comparisons and select the best option.

We discussed a proactive approach to save your business from any disaster. Now we will discuss what steps to protect your business when a disaster strikes.

While it’s difficult to predict that every disaster can hit your business. You can take some essential steps to avoid serious losses and continue your business without any interruption or loss of valuables.

As most of the money is spent on fixed assets like building, machinery, and growing business, you may be overlooking for preventions for any loss and continuity of business operations. As said by The Institute of Business and Home Safety, approximately 25% of organizations are not able to restart their business after a major disaster.

When you read the word “major disaster” there are some earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. There is already guidance and checklists are available to overcome losses of these natural disasters. So you can easily use these tools to survive. You should also think about manmade disasters and their losses.

A Recovery Plan after Disaster

Make a task force from your internal staff and assign them to create a complete recovery after a disaster. This plan can be further shared with all departments to follow accordingly.

Assume when a disaster hits your business and destroys your workplace, there are some questions to answer.

• How you maintain services?

• How you maintain the building and other fixed assets?

• How you continue sales and services?

• How your teams communicate internally and with customers?

• How the staff reaches the workplace?

• Is there any temporary workplace?

• Is there any business continuity plan?

• Who is responsible for the communication of new instructions?

 

Answer all the above questions in your recovery plan, make hard copies of all procedures, and keep this record as a backup at any other safe place. Sometimes, you cannot retrieve all data from your computer servers due to the massive loss of the building. That’s why these hard copies are needed to act according to the plan immediately.

Communication Plan

Communication is critical to successfully implement any business plan. So you have to pay special attention to make an effective communication plan. Record emergency contact information and home addresses of employees.

All departments are also individually responsible for maintaining the contact Information database of vendors, suppliers, and customers. In case of any emergency, all these departments must contact their related persons to continue the business process.

For example, if you have no contact with suppliers, how you run your production unit without any raw material required. Or on the other hand, if you lost touch with the client, then how you can sell your products and services.

So an effective communication plan is the backbone of every business process. That’s why every business should maintain a proper record and a safe backup offsite.

Confirm and Test Remote Work Setup

Most of the business can run their operations remotely. But some industries like manufacturing have difficulties in shifting their setups on different places from their core location. So proper planning is required to move your business to remote areas in case of an emergency.

This is also important to follow not only planning and paperwork is enough. You just need to test these plans for practice, again and again, to check its results for further improvement. There are also some questions to answer and care about.

Is official contact numbers are possible to shift on personal mobiles rather than phone lines? Can you shift employee’s data on remote server securely? Can you arrange a meeting on online sources like ZOOM?

There is a simple approach to answering all these questions. Just imagine all the worst conditions and their available solution and select the best one.

How to Maintain Backup

Most businesses save their data backup in hard drives and cloud drives, but sometimes not both. It’s important to consider that a hard drive can also be affected during fire, earthquake, and other natural disasters. Cloud backup also takes extended time mostly to retrieve. So a fast backup required to execute for continuity of the business process.

It must be ensured that your back procedure and resources are much more effective when responding to the required time. And restore essential data to start the business process at a remote place. Also, confirm the efficiency and reliability of said data by checking again and again before any practical situation.

It is challenging to plan about unseen situations that did not yet happen with your practice because you are not sure about what type of loss can occur. You can manage this by taking the help of experts like your insurance agents to review all your planning and suggest the best changes required.

It will minimize the risk of unseen happening and help you to effectively respond on time for the survival of your business.