There are a lot of things that can interrupt the flow of your business, and as a business leader, it’s your job to mitigate those interruptions. Without the right preparation, business interruptions can be extremely costly. Your business could even fail to recover from it if you don’t prepare properly and business interruption can occur from a range of different issues. Sometimes, the reason behind the interruption is a natural disaster that you can’t avoid or plan ahead too closely for. Other times, you’re dealing with being hacked like many of the businesses who were hacked in 2020. These huge data breaches are those that are hardest to recover from, and the business interruption can be devastating to your business.
You have to do whatever you can to minimize the interruptions to your business as they happen, from investing in IT managed service plans to prevent data breaches, to getting to know the yearly climate changes in your town and preparing for any disasters that way. Your business deserves to be thought of properly, and you have to add business interruption risks to your business plan so that you can be ready for anything. You would put up contingencies in the office if you were in a flood risk area, and you would do what you could to minimize the hit to your insurance, too. COVID-19 has been a killer for many businesses in the past year as the interruption was too great to mitigate. So, with this in mind, here are some of the things that you can do to avoid business interruption in future and prepare yourself for any issues ahead!
Keep up with risk assessments
You need to make a list of all of the possible dangers that your business could face and be realistic about it. You have to know what they are before you can begin taking any steps to minimize them going forward. There are companies out there that can do this for you, and even your business insurance company could do it for you and come back with a list of risks that you can work to close off and mitigate. You have to be thorough with this, though, as anything can slip through the net if you are not careful!
Add to your business plan
When you wrote your business plan at the start of opening your own company, you may well have chosen to write a business continuity plan with it. This plan is going to tell you how your business will cope when disruption occurs. You need this plan as part of your strategy and it should always include a comprehensive insurance plan that will cover you and your staff as well as the property and any buildings involved. Disasters can affect everyone, and make sure that you have a plan for things like COVID, too!
Write a disaster recovery plan
While we’re talking business planning, this is one such plan you really want to ensure that you have nailed down. Disaster recovery plans are going to go beyond your standard business continuity plan and include the high level things that could wipe your business out. Most businesses don’t have these and this was evident during the past year for COVID. No matter how unlikely it is that an earthquake will hit your business, there is no harm in planning for one in case Mother Nature really does give it up and throw us all into the void one day. Protecting your business will be a high priority that could save your livelihood.
Get Pro-Tech-Ted
Your digital technology, whether in the office or in remote locations, needs to be as protected as possible. Consider your firewall situation, passwords, who has access to which systems – it all matters. You need to make sure that you have the right IT systems ahead of you to ensure that you are going to be protected from hackers. The more you protect yourself from hackers, the better off you will be and your data will remain secure.
Train Your Staff
If you want to make sure that you have the right business interruption plan in place, you need to educate the people working with you. Training is a must on your working days and your staff need to be aware of what’s going on and know how to spring into action. The right training will ensure that the people working for you know how to act and where to go, and this is vital as it could save a life.