How many disasters have we had recently?
A bunch of hurricanes last year and wildfires in the West, not to mention government shutdowns. If you encounter setbacks like these, you may have to deal with issues like lost revenue, extra expenses, reduced profit, and insurance – and insurance doesn’t cover everything.

Disasters happen every day. If your business isn’t prepared for them, it could mean the end.
But…

You can mitigate the impact of disasters on your business when you have the right plans in place.
While planning for every possible contingency can be challenging, we simplified the process by including a detailed Business Continuity Checklist that specifically addresses disaster recovery.

This checklist is designed to help business owners look at all of the different pieces of their business that could be impacted by a disaster.

If you have one certain kind of disruption, it may not require the entire plan, but say you get wiped out in a fire – that’s probably going to require all of the elements of the plan.

Or if you have a work stoppage like a strike (Heaven forbid!). Maybe it’s not your business having a strike, but at one of your suppliers. What does that look like?

Say imports get hit hard with increased tariffs – you’ll need a plan in place. You need to be dual-sourced with your vendors, and if you have suppliers bringing components in from different offshore suppliers, that could interrupt your flow of business, your inventory, and adversely impact your supply chain (and the cost of it).

What do you do with that information? How do you communicate that to your customers, and can you take the price increase to them? You may not think of that as a business interruption, but it could have a huge impact on the profitability and the viability of your business.

That’s why you will find in the Toolkit a checklist of 11 crucial areas to include in your continuity plan. The following are just a few:

• The key information your employees and customers need to know in the event of an emergency.
• The critical equipment, data files, and supplies you must have at your backup site.
• An established business “escape route”
  You’ll find those (and much more) to help you develop your business continuity plan.

Successfully yours,
Patty

P.S. – ready.gov also has some excellent resources for developing your business continuity plan, as well as assessing the impact of the setbacks you run into.