What if disaster strikes my business while I'm away?

How will my team cope?

Shit happens.

The trick is to be ready for it. Not necessarily a ‘make it go away’ kind of ready. More a ‘we can get through this without falling apart’ kind of ready. So your business can carry on keeping it’s Promise to customers and clients. While you’re away, or maybe while you sort out a recovery.

I don’t know what would constitute a disaster for your business, but I do know what it feels like to be hit by one. So today I’m going to write about:

What you can do to prevent unexpected breakdowns from affecting your business
What you can do to minimise the impact of an unexpected breakdown in normal service
The key question to keep in mind when dealing with an unexpected breakdown in normal service

What you can do to prevent unexpected breakdowns from affecting your business

Protect yourself as far as you can

Make sure every device has decent anti-viral, anti-malware protection installed. I use webroot (https://www.webroot.com/gb/en) to protect laptops, phones and browsers

Teach your team to recognise the signs of ‘dodgy’ emails. One reason it is useful to make payment part of the process is that an email requesting payment of an invoice should stick out like a sore thumb - even if it is apprently the boss asking for it.

Make sure your team understand the consequences of visiting ‘dodgy’ sites. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I see nothing wrong with vetoing access to non-business-related sites during working hours. Or via company devices. Of course this might mean you have to supply them with a company phone, tablet or laptop, that remain separate from anything they have for personal use.

Make sure you regularly back up key data

Keep shared data in one place (not distributed across everybody’s devices) and back it up.

Automate backups if you can. If you can’t, make backing up part of your ‘End Business Day’ process

Make sure it really is backed up in a form you can use by testing backed-up data regularly. I.e. restore it to a new location and test it.

Make paper backups of key documents (including contact lists and emergency numbers) nd keep them in a fireproof safe.

Build redundancy/flexibility into your day-to-day business

Make sure more than one team member able to play every Role in your business (including your role as ‘The Boss’).

Make sure people can work from more than one location (home, office, coffee shop, library, fellow business owner’s office…)

Keep backups in more than one format (cloud, external hard drive, paper).

Keep backups in more than one place (cloud, external hard drive held offsite, paper held offsite)

Keep supplies of key materials or spares of key components topped up regularly.

Keep backup supplies or spares in more than one location.

What you can do to minimise the impact of an unexpected breakdown in normal service.

Document the key processes you run as a framework of outcomes and dependencies rather than standard operating procedures. After all, it’s the outcome that matters to your clients, they don’t care nearly as much as you do how you get there.

As you do:

Make sure you build timely replenishment (of both regular and backup supplies) into your Keep Promise processes:

Example - Replenish spray tan solution when you get down to 2 day’s worth of supply - so you’re not caught short over a weekend

Example - Put a physical ‘re-order flag’ into your stock of items, to trigger a re-order before you run out. Where the re-order flag goes will depend on the lead-time for the specific product. If it’s something you can produce yourself quickly, it can be near the end, if you have to order it in from a third party, it will be nearer the top of the pile.

Example - One business owner I know, who runs a data centre, always keeps a spare by each rack of servers. Actually, they keep a spare for the spare, and a spare for the spare of the spare. Every time they visit to take out an existng server, they bring in a new spare, so there are never less than three spares available. OCD, but it’s how they keep their 99.9% uptime promise.

Example - Build replenishment into your ‘End Business Day’/End Business Week’/’End Business Month’/’End Business Quarter’ processes - depending on how much space you have to store stuff and how critical the supply is to your business, you might check every day, every week, every quarter.

Make sure you build data storage and backup into your Keep Promise processes:

Example - Whenever I draft a process that creates or changes data I include a final task; ‘File ' The process isn't complete unless the data is filed away safely.

Example - At Mitsubishi Electric, back in the olden days of computers, we backed up our project data every night onto 2 Bernouilli boxes, one stayed in the office, one went home with the boss. Now you have the cloud, but it’s still worth backing up to an external hard drive too.

Make sure you build maintenance into your Keep Promise processes:

Example - Delivering a spray tan to a client isn’t complete until you have cleaned the airbrush, ready for the next user.

Example - Tidy, clean and inspect your work-van (or workspace) every night so you spot danger points early and are always ready for the morning.

Example - Test your phones and your internet every morning, so you know as soon as possible if there is a problem.

Make sure you build redundancy into all your processes:

Example - Train at least 2 team members to run each of your key processes. Even better have each process run by a pair of team members. It seems wasteful, but has been proven in software development to reduce errors and actually improve productivity.

Example - Set up each team member with additional company devices they can use out of the office. Buy them a company phone too.

Example - Make friends with other businesses around you, whether that’s physically or because you belong to the same industry, the same networking group, the same golf club. Someone may lend you a meeting room, a spare device, their toilets, whatever they can do. Because despite what the news tells us, most people are kind, and very willing to help out when needed.

The key question to keep in mind when dealing with an unexpected breakdown in normal service:

“How can I continue to serve clients with what I have?”

One morning, after a thundery weekend, I walked into our office to find our server was out of action. The office had been hit by lightning. No shared access to our data, no call handling software, no shared email.

Luckily, there had been no fire, the phones still worked, we still had internet, our PCs still worked and all had Microsoft Office installed. Nobody’d been hurt.

The first thing to do was set in train the replacement and recovery of the server. We did nightly backups, with one taken offsite, so that was straightforward. But it was going to take at least a week to put right.

What to do in the meantime? How could we continue to deliver a service?

This is where documenting your processes as a framework of outcomes helps.

We were still able to “Answer Call” because the phones still worked. It just meant we didn’t know who the call was for until we answered it.

We were still able to “Respond to Call” in whatever way the client had stipulated, because we had paper processes to follow for each of our clients (and in any case knew them pretty much off by heart). We’d also created a paper backup of all contact details for clients and their clients.

We were still able to “Log Call Actions” because while we didn’t have a server or call-handling software, we still had PCs with Excel on them, so we could create a simple spreadsheet with tabs for each client.

We were still able to “Send Call Action Log” to each client because we had our spreadsheets and email. It just took longer to collate the data for each client into a single spreadsheet for reporting, which meant I stayed behind after hours.

Of course we told our clients what had happened and how we were going to deal with it. Not one of them complained. It wasn’t that they didn’t notice any difference, it was that we were able to keep our key service - “Answer the call to the client as if you were the client, then send them details of all calls handled” - going sufficiently well to make them happy to stay with us.

Given the question: “How can I continue to serve clients with what I have?”, and the support of high-level processes, your team will be able to find their own way to deal with whatever disaster may happen while you're away. Especially if you've built some resilience into the day-to-day working of your business.

Of course, remember to document your 'Recover' process too. That way you don't even have to be there to do that.

That’s it.

Here’s what I hope you learned today:

If you build some basic precautions into the day-to-day running of your business, including making friends, you’ll be much better placed to weather a disaster.
If disaster happens, start with this question: “How can I continue to serve clients with what I have?”
When disaster strikes, the most important thing is not to recover from it. The most important thing is to be able to carry on your business while you recover from it.

So,

What simple precautions do you have in place to prevent disasters?

Do you know how you would recover?

Could your team find a way to continue to serve clients until recovery was complete?

If you want to start thinking about what a disaster would mean for your business, and how you would deal with it, here’s a useful Business Continuity Toolkit from HM Governement.

I might well turn it into a process. I’ll let you know.

If you'd like some help writing down your day-to-day processes, get in touch.

Thanks for reading!