Now that hurricane season is upon us, and the projections are for it to be unusually active, it’s time to make sure that your business, employees, vendors and customers have a disaster plan in place. Here are some thoughts on how to plan for, and mitigate the effects of, storms that may impact our area.
Start by considering some basic business functions—how they relate to your business, and their vulnerability to storm damage. What you do to mitigate them will depend on factors unique to your business, but here are some examples:

Your business sells a service or a product.
If you have a product that you purchase, you need a secure storage location, or better yet, two locations in case one is damaged. If you sell a perishable product, you may need on-site power generation.
If your product requires frequent ordering, you will need to ensure that your vendors have a plan to deliver to you despite any damages they may incur. If you produce the product, you will need another location to use in the event that yours is damaged. (For example, a printer in County A might have a mutual arrangement with a printer in County B to use the other person’s plant after hours if their own plant is damaged.)

Service businesses will need to ensure that employees, business vehicles and needed tools and supplies can get to customers. Plan B might involve sending vehicles home with employees during a storm so they are not all in a central location, and issuing smart phones or satellite phones to key employees.
To make sure employees can have access to business applications such as order processing and accounting during an emergency, you might want to run these applications on the web.

Your business needs employees to perform the work.
Your employees (unless they are able to work from home) will need access to your premises (or the client’s site). Sending service vehicles home with employees will help them react clients if a hurricane damages your business. For a non-service business, you may have to coordinate transportation if their personal vehicles are damaged or roads are blocked. Having contact with employees (home phones, cell phones and satellite phones if appropriate) will allow you to make arrangements.

Your customers need to have access to your products.
Being open is only the start of returning to normalcy after a significant storm. In most businesses, your customers must have access to your premises. You may need to make temporary parking arrangements if your lot is littered with debris, set up roadside package pick-up for phone-ahead orders or deliver to customers if they are unable to get to you.
Also, you may want to map out safe travel routes with law enforcement that you can communicate to your customers. If you have to do business from a secondary or replacement location, you will need to communicate that as well.
You will need to communicate with your customers.
Your customers need to know that you are open, which routes to your site are clear, any special arrangements in regard to parking or curbside pickup, the options for you to deliver to them and directions to any secondary or replacement locations.
This can be done by phone or cell phone (you should have the cell phone numbers of your major customers), e-mail, texting, radio or TV ads, or other means.

The above list could be repeated for your vendors. You can find a great general template you can use to develop a plan at www.ready.gov. Click on “Ready Business” for your business and use the other links to provide information to your employees so they can have a personal plan.
Remember that while we are addressing the beginning of hurricane season, there are many other forms of disasters that can affect business. Historically, fire is the greatest risk, but you could have a disaster from a broken pipe that flooded the business over a weekend. Having a plan in place will enable you to recover faster.