How To Disaster-Proof Your Business

how much pain to your business if you suddenly feel you can not e-mail clients? What if you lost a file correspondence or phone loses dial tone? We try to avoid thinking about the operations of a disaster until it hits close to home. And when problems hit, they must be fixed yesterday and are willing to pay a lot of them go.

Anticipate common problems

How to get rid of them will depend on your business model, budget and risk tolerance:

Fire / earthquake / hurricane . Imagine if everyone in your office is destroyed. What are the steps you will take that stuff and running? Theft. Your important information is left in the hands of who knows? Did you keep your passwords, financial and contact information (especially your clients)?

There is no connection to the Internet. How could you get / send e-mail? No dialing. How could you call (and get calls from) your customers?

web host network. How can people find on-line?

E-mail bounced / blocked. I recently discovered that my domain was "fake" (someone sent me a bunch of spam to people, making it seem as if I had e-mail). The result is that I could send e-mail to some of my existing clients. My work-around was to create a (free) Gmail account (which is not blocked) to send outgoing messages of the client.

Crashed hard drive / virus. files are not available. Now what?

Deleted / lost / trashed the file (s ). One (or more) files on your computer (or web) is suddenly unusable. How can you get it back?

disease / death / pantry. What if you or your employees could do their job?

Incorrect contact information. An important advertising (including the Yellow Pages list 411 or information) is the wrong contact information (in the worst case: your competition contact information ).

money. What if I bounced a check on one of your suppliers? What if your credit card denied? What if your merchant account terminated processing your customer payments?

Do not forget to test

Too often people find that their computer backups were incomplete or unusable. Restore the backup to another computer. Use in computer for one day.

This is not an issue if you have a problem, it's just when.

spending time (and money) to avoid the problem can feel like a distraction from the growing (or to) your business. But it is the key to making customers feel like you're there when you need it.