Emergencies and disasters affect everyone and can happen when least expected. Businesses, for one, are highly vulnerable to these events since they can be affected in a variety of ways and on different levels of impact.
For example, a human-induced fire in a hotel can technically raze everything to the ground in minutes — important business documents, the day’s revenue, facilities, and even the building itself. Worse, there could be human casualties in the mix — injuries and even fatalities. These are simply a business owner’s worst nightmares.
As such, business owners must anticipate the worst-case scenarios in terms of such unforeseen events. Being prepared for every imaginable emergency will allow them to swiftly respond to prevent their business from shutting down temporarily or permanently.
If you own or manage a business, here are five simple tricks on how you can prepare your business for emergencies and make it disaster-ready in no time:
Know your legal obligations and solutions
Certain business disasters could land you in legal trouble if you don’t know how to respond and know whether the damages incurred are part of your legal obligations.
For example, a data breach that compromised your customers’ personal information could lead to a class-action lawsuit that could damage your business beyond repair. By knowing what legal remedies you can avail of, it’s possible to minimize, if not eliminate, the damaging impacts it has on your business.
The best way to prepare for this is to consult with a reliable corporate or commercial law firm. This will give you proper guidance on the different business law situations that you could face and what exact legal remedies are available to you. Knowledge is power and your attorney could give you the business law knowledge you need to brace for or avoid, potential legal problems concerning your business.
Come up with, test, and constantly update your business emergency plan
Your business needs to have a custom business emergency plan to serve as your blueprint on how you would respond to various emergencies such as flooding, fire, and data leak.
Once you have the plan ready, you should find ways to test it out through simulations and then judge from the results whether your plan is already good as it stands or if you need to tweak it accordingly. Additionally, you should periodically update the plan every five years or so to be really in tune with current situations.
Be properly equipped
For emergencies where a response is needed such as fire and flooding, your business must be properly equipped. By this, it means having the physical equipment appropriate to the emergency on hand to quickly keep things under control.
For fire incidents, fire-retardant suits, fire extinguishers, and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) are the bare minimum; for flooding, a rubber boat with paddles, flotation devices (rescue can, life vests), and water ropes are recommended.
Meanwhile, equipping the business also entails training employees to serve as the first responders, and not the response teams from the municipal or state governments. By having your in-house rescue team, you can be sure that there will be an immediate response to emergencies while more capable responders are on their way.
Get ample insurance coverage
No matter how sophisticated your disaster response equipment and personnel are, some things are just beyond human capabilities. As such, you need to have adequate insurance coverage that would cushion the economic impacts of disasters such as fire, flooding, hurricanes, and other emergencies.
For some business owners, getting insurance policies are pretty pointless since, they say, Murphy’s Law is bound to happen anyway. However, common sense dictates that unless you have contingency measures in place, the things that could go wrong would go wrong, but with effects that could get your business crashing to the ground.
With this in mind, be sure to treat insurance policies as your go-to measures should disasters, both human-induced and natural, come knocking on your doors. They may be unavoidable, but at least you’ll have something to mitigate their ill effects on your business.
Back up your data to the cloud
Data is easily one of the most vital assets of any business, big or small. As such, it’s only prudent that you do everything you can to ensure that no disaster could compromise your critical business data. The easiest way to guarantee this is to back up your data to the cloud by availing of an enterprise-grade cloud solution.
The money you’ll invest in safeguarding your essential data will surely be worth it, especially when you need to continue operations after every disaster.
Making your business ready for any disaster requires hard work. With these simple tricks, you can achieve such business readiness much easier.
