Preparedness Profile: Business Continuity Plan

9/5/2018 (Permalink)

A flooded office space.

September is National Preparedness Month all across the United States. In an effort to help you be more prepared, we’re putting together a different “Preparedness Profile” each week this month.

For the first week, we’re talking about how business owners can plan and be prepared in the event of a disaster. Just like a family needs to plan for things like fires and floods: how they will get out of the house if dangerous conditions occur, what items they will need in an emergency and what insurance they might need to cover any losses; a business needs to do the same.

The key to taking care of your investment and employees is to create a business continuity plan. The SERVPRO team cannot recommend this enough. Having a plan will ensure everyone’s safety and ensure that you can get back to work as soon as possible. This also helps ensure you will lose as little productivity as possible.

According to ready.gov, there are four main steps to creating a business continuity plan:

• Do a Business Impact Analysis
  • Ask how a disaster would affect your business’s ability to function.
  • Would there be a loss of production? How long? How will that loss affect the bottom line?
  • What equipment (like computers or machinery) might be affected? How can you protect those ahead of time.
• Come up with Recovery Strategies
  • What resources can you fall back on? Do you have another location to work from, for example?
  • Who will you turn to for help in the recovery? Will you call on SERVPRO to clean up, for example?
  • Can work be done remotely?
• Develop Your Plan
  • Organize a recovery team among your employees.
  • Make sure you have any necessary insurance to replace what could be lost.
  • What resources will your business need during the recovery process, in the hours, days, weeks and months that follow a disaster?
  • Create a relocation plan, if necessary.
• Test Your Plan
  • Run emergency drills with your employees to ensure they know what to do in the event of unsafe conditions like fire or biohazard spills.
  • Encourage your employees to consider how they would react and work after a disaster.
  • Run through your plans. Will they work? If not, come up with a new plan.

At SERVPRO we ask that, as a business owner, you plan to stay in business, encourage your employees to be ready and protect your investment. Planning ahead can help make all of this possible.

As a business leader, you are a community leader. You can set a good example for your community by having a disaster plan. If you do it, that will encourage others to do it too. And that will make everyone safer.

And SERVPRO of West Brown County can help you in all of this planning by doing an Emergency Readiness Profile (ERP) for your business, free of charge. The ERP is a document that you can refer to in a disaster situation to know things like the first responders you need to contact, the areas of the building that might be affected by a particular incident and the chain of command in an emergency.

Call us anytime to schedule an ERP at 920-434-8224 and make sure you are prepared for the worst.