Planning for sudden roadblocks is crucial to the success of your business.
As a business owner, it seems like an impossible task– how do you expect the unknown and plan for challenges that can’t be foreseen? You know any sudden hurdle that needs to be overcome has to be met with enough strategy and confidence to get you through it, but where does that come from?
It’s all a matter of preparing for the worst when it comes to your entrepreneurial success. You’ve got to prevent circumstances from becoming overwhelming and keep the business running along smoothly even as each new problem rears its head.
By Mary Juetten
Protecting your physical property shouldn’t be just a matter of the right insurance policy. Chances are you have things far more valuable than a desk that occupy your office space, things that should be even more zealously guarded than the bricks and mortar that physically manifest your company. Many companies have drawings and prototypes kept on site, and possibly sensitive data that is stored on a local server or an air-gapped device — valuable objects and information that can’t be replaced with a check from the insurance company.
Keeping your most valuable information and IP protected against physical damage or destruction requires extra measures that can go unconsidered in many cases. Safes might be thought of as an anachronism in an age where anything and everything is going digital, but secure physical copies of sensitive information guard against potential loss if local data is damaged in a disaster. And while on-site data storage can seem like a more prudent option to the security-concerned, it faces the same potential risks as everything else you keep in your office; cloud storage, if handled securely, can offer equivalent or possibly better security in a monitored off-site facility, eliminating concerns about disaster recovery.
Perhaps most important to preventing business failure in the event of a disaster is keeping thorough records on purchases, transactions, and all of the business you conduct and storing them securely. Having to rely on memory and guesswork to piece together contract terms or the price of expenditures will inevitably lead to mistakes, and could leave your business on unsure footing. Much of what we do is already digital, but for those things still on paper, creating digital copies to upload to the cloud is a smart way to create a complete record that is safe against damage.
While we can’t plan when disasters will hit, or schedule them during down periods when the pain of recovery isn’t as excruciating, we can prepare against the day when the worst might happen so that we’re back on our feet as quickly as possible. #onwards.
