You need a Plan B for every potential business disrupting situation.
The two situations for which every business owner needs to have a Plan B are:
- What needs to happen in/with your business if you become ill or are injured and cannot work?
- How would you continue to operate if a pandemic disease, natural disaster, fire, flood or terrorist threat prevented you from working where and how you are doing it now?
To continue operating your business in either of these two scenarios, you need to have a Business Continuity Plan that includes:
- a Communications Strategy
- access to operating processes and procedures documentation
- pre-defined standards and measurement criteria for product and service delivery
- a Backup Strategy for all critical data
- resources (physical, financial and human) you can rely on
- an established chain of command with defined roles and responsibilities
- critical information lists (contacts, applications, passwords, bank accounts etc.)
- a Recovery Strategy
In future posts, I will share how we dealt with the emergency created by my accident. Who knew I’d be out of commission for five years because of my injuries! I certainly couldn’t have predicted that.
Yet, because a Business Continuity Plan was already in place, I still have a business to go back to. Thankfully! And, while I wouldn’t want any of you to have to go through the hell I’ve been through, if something similar should happen to you, I would not want you to lose your business over it.
I’m planning to create a template to help walk you through the various elements of such a plan to use for your business. For now though, I’m just asking you to give some serious thought to questions 1 & 2 at the start of this post. The rest comes later.
More next time. Until then, remember to LOVE YOUR WORK, whatever it may be.
PS I hope you’ll find the new RAISING THE BAR series inspiring. If so, please share this post with friends and followers. You never know what burdens others are carrying or how much their load might be made lighter by doing so. ♥♥♥
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ABOUT RAISING THE BAR:
Raising The Bar is a new series for the SMARTSTART community that has been taking shape in my head for most of the time I’ve spent working to recover from catastrophic brain, spinal cord and psychological injuries resulting from a near fatal accident in 2009. Success, whether it’s in rehab, business, relationships, or life, hinges on our ability to master this simple formula: Belief (B) + Attitude (A) = Response (R).
I’m excited to be sharing it with you now as a next step in my injury recovery. Consider this your invitation to join me on a grand adventure. Oh, the places we will go! Including all the places that scare us most. For that is where the greatest opportunities for joy and happiness — the true measures of success — reside!