When constructing a business continuity plan, the process of determining how your business would function in a disaster can be a bit of a guessing game. While you can be prepared for things that are likely to happen, what about the things completely unexpected? While it’s not necessarily smart to plan excessively for the unexpected, a valuable key factor is looking to experience for answers. One part of business continuity not usually considered is talking with someone on your staff who’s lived through a disaster and witnessed business continuity in action.

Is it a good idea to listen to them and take their experiences seriously?

Asking Experienced Staff to Share Stories

Some of those past experiences with disasters may be from some of your senior staff who lived through infamous hurricanes, earthquakes, or any other calamity. CIO.com says these people are usually willing to share their stories and tell about the experiences they went through. They should be included when your entire staff meets to put together a business continuity plan. In fact, the team behind your continuity plan should take notes as those people tell their stories. Those experienced staff stories may have a few valuable tips to help you deal better with the unexpected.

Scoping Out Tips from the Past

Even if that staff member lived through a disaster years ago, finding out how a business managed to get through it all should be just as applicable today. You can compare the technology back then to what’s available today and demonstrate how much easier it can be now. However, there may be certain disaster scenarios that technology can’t always immediately help. Those situations can lead to more timeless tips, like creating a disaster plan for employees if they’re stuck at home.

Coming Up With Offbeat or Clever Ideas

When dealing with unexpected situations, finding out offbeat tips that the employee used in a business continuity plan can be just as valuable as the practical ideas. Hopefully you can find more than one experienced employee so you can gather numerous ideas implemented in the far or recent past. Sometimes the most offbeat ideas will sound awkward at first, yet be very helpful when all the proactive steps taken during disasters don’t apply.

Have all of these tools at the ready, because disasters continue to bring situations that nobody can predict. As for your main continuity plan, let Continuity Centers bring true expertise to all your business disaster planning, including your disaster recovery.

Contact us and we’ll bring you everything you need from a business audit to data backup. We also provide workgroup recovery centers as alternative locations when your main business site is destroyed. Regardless of our own expert plans, we’ll let you listen to your experienced employees since experience is going to matter in preparing for things from left field.

Funny thing about a backup power generator is you never want to make the investment in one until you see the weather reports start to trickle in warning of impending natural disaster. Usually right around that time, the home improvement stores see a run on home generators wiping them out of literally every item in their warehouses that are capable of producing power. Well, it’s bad enough when this happens in the home. For many home owners this means the refrigerator stops running, the stove won’t turn on, the toilet may not flush if there’s a well pump involved, and more importantly a temperamental three year old can’t watch Dora The Explorer to keep herself entertained when necessary. As devastating as this can be to a family depending on all thesemodern conveniences, what happens when natural disaster threatens your livelihood? What happens if the electricity stops working for several days at your place of business? Will important data be lost? Will vital operations stop working? Most importantly, will you be able to recover when power is finally restored? 

Often times, being an effective leader in your industry requires high levels of forethought. It’s not about just seeing what is right in front of you and happening in the moment, but what may happen in the future and under non-ideal conditions. With winter steadily approaching in many areas of the country, damaging amounts of snowfall and high-powered winds will be causing Dora The Explorer to be on hiatus in many households and disaster plans to take shape in many businesses. Don’t let blizzards and other forms of natural disaster interrupt or even destroy your business operations. Make a plan now and include power generator delivery in that plan.

A sufficient backup generator can mean uninterrupted service for your business operations. Your business won’t miss a beat, except for possibly a ten second delay from power going out for everyone else to your generator kicking in and saving the day, and potentially your business. Storms will come and go this winter, and with each one you will have the peace of mind in knowing that the power will not go out on your livelihood. Isn’t that worth the one time investment?

At Continuity Centers, we firmly believe that there is no substitute for peace of mind. Our corporate mission statement is to “Protect our Members and ensure they continue business as usual during any type of business interruption.” Generator delivery is just one service among many that we can help you with, involving workgroup recovery, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning. Please contact us today for more information. We would love the opportunity to speak with you.