I’ve written about emergency and disaster planning before and will again in the future because it is important; I know this from personal experience.
As I mentioned in the previous article, BDC has advice on all kinds of planning, including emergency and disaster planning. Again, it’s written for larger organizations that have enough people to set up teams, among them an emergency preparedness team. So I’m going to adapt the eight steps they propose for emergency and disaster planning to suit the more limited circumstances of smaller businesses.
Here are the 8 steps modified and abbreviated:
- Establish responsibility for developing a plan. In many small businesses this will inevitably be the owner.
- Identify the essential services and functions you’ll need in case of an emergency.
- Identify the skills at your disposal that might be needed in an emergency.
- Identify the types of potential emergencies.
- Prepare a plan for each type of potential emergency,
- Review the plan to make sure that all possible aspects have been addressed.
- Review the plan with employees and/or your preparedness team (if you have one).
And again, like all other plans, once prepared it should be revisited and updated regularly rather than being left to gather dust somewhere.