Disaster Management Tips and Tricks for Your Business

2/4/2021 (Permalink)

According to a report from FEMA, 50% of businesses do not reopen following a disaster. Having a disaster preparedness guide is one of the easiest ways to help ensure your business survives and recovers. Follow these tips below in order to give you and your business the best chances of surviving a disaster.

1. Prevention: The best way to avoid a disaster is to do everything you can to prevent one from happening. Accidents happen, but by routinely performing safety and system checks within your business you decrease your chances of experiencing a disaster. Ensure equipment such as fire sprinklers and fire alarms are working properly and ensure that office cords aren’t frayed or worn.
2. Evacuation plan: As stated above, accidents happen. But when they do, how will you respond? Will you freeze up and panic not knowing what to do, or will you establish and follow a plan to ensure your safety and help minimize damages to your business? Know your evacuation routes and establish a meeting place to ensure the safety and well-being of everyone in your office, as well as the procedures needed to take to minimize additional property damages and ensure help is on its way.
3. Emergency contacts: In addition to having emergency personnel and disaster relief agencies contact information, you should include information for customers, suppliers, and distributors. Be sure to keep an extra copy off site in the event that the office copy is not accessible. Here at SERVPRO of West Palm Beach, we offer the ERP (Emergency Ready Program) where we will organize and compile all of the necessary shut off valves to consider during a disaster as well as the proper contacts to speak with immediately following.
4. Emergency kit: Depending on how much time you have to react to the disaster your experiencing, creating an emergency kit can come in handy. Be sure to include items such as first aid supplies, flashlights, and universal tool kits to help keep you safe no matter what the scenario.
5. Protect important business records: These days, most of our important documents can be stored electronically up in the cloud. However, if your business carries hard copies of important business records, be sure to keep them in a secure safe that is tested and approved by UL (Underwriters Laboratories) as being resistant to fire, heat, burglary, tools and torches.
6. Create backup copies of critical data and programs: Keep the back-up copies in a location separate from your primary facility. In the event of a flood or fire, you will be happy to have your irreplaceable data destroyed.
7. Understand your insurance coverage: Be sure to review and understand your insurance policy with your local agent to make dure you know what your responsibilities are in a disaster and what your covered for. There are a variety of different insurance policies with different deductibles and amounts of coverage, so in order to save yourself additional stress, find a policy that will cover what is most important to you.
8. Call the professionals: Immediately following a disaster, call the professionals at SERVPRO of West Palm Beach. The sooner we can evaluate and repair the damages the sooner you can get your business back up and running!