A natural disaster can strike at any time, such calamity is unavoidable. For small businesses that are hit by a natural disaster, the impact will be irreversibly damaging and unpredictable. Small business owners need to act quickly following a natural disaster to protect workers, provide continuity and repair property or infrastructure.
It can be tough to build after a natural disaster. Around 40 % of small businesses don’t reopen their doors after disasters.
There are some measures that small businesses can take in the wake of a natural disaster to help minimize the impact and damage. Take a glance at what you should do after a natural disaster strikes your business.
- Evaluate your business model
After a natural disaster, you may want to take a glance at your operations and see if there are any ways to expand or shift your business model to increase sales going forward.
It’s a good time to assess if you’re exploring every possible channel with your business online, offline, inbound leads, email marketing, social marketing, etc. Taking a step back and making small changes can help with reaching your goals and recovering from a potential drop in sales.
- Plan ahead
One of the simplest ways to get over a natural disaster is to have planned for it. In addition to the business continuity plan mentioned above, there are some necessary steps you should take before anything goes wrong that can help you recover and rebuild in the aftermath. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recommends that small businesses cultivate partnerships in their local communities. This includes different businesses, local governments and nonprofits. Having these relationships in place before time will help you to understand who to reach out to when things go wrong.
- Communicate with employees, customers and stakeholders
It’s hard to figure out where to prioritize when your business is hit by a natural disaster. While you get organized and figure out a plan, it’s critical to communicate as quickly and transparently as possible with your existing customers and new customers who are searching for you online.
The first step is to update your website’s homepage or blog. Customers’ patience, empathy and support will only get stronger when they notice that one of their favourite small businesses has been impacted.
- Use your online presence to help the community
After a natural disaster, people are continuously looking for ways to reach out and help, but not all of these people can be on location.
Give them away to support your shop and your community with a donation or purchase. People are always looking for ways to help recovery efforts, and supporting small local business is a great way to support a recovering community. To achieve this, he said, ensure that your online store is updated with current products. Not only will this allow you to continue to make sales, but it’s also a great way to spread awareness about recovery efforts personally and in your community.
- Check your backed-up data
You should already have backed up and safely stored your most important data: your business license, major contracts and legal documents, tax returns and financial statements, and other important business and client documents. Following a disaster, ensure that all your important documents and records must be securely accessible from the devices you’re using.
Your business continuity plan should prepare you for major disaster scenarios, like the loss or unavailability of IT systems, key people or a third party facility. ensure personnel will have access to the plan on secured mobile devices immediately after a disaster.
- Contact your insurance company
Once your workers are safe and accounted for once a disaster, survey the harm. Contact your insurance underwriter to file a claim. you ought to do associate occasional medical to confirm you have got adequate coverage for major disaster sorts. workplace break-ins and devilment might occur throughout a natural disaster, and if somebody steals laptop instrumentation of paper documents containing in person distinctive info, and also the info wasn’t encrypted, you’ll have a legal demand to inform customers.
To be safe, encipher your client knowledge, digitise paper documents, and store all important knowledge during a secure, cloud-based document management system.
- Assess your vendors
Another way to plan is to look at the vendors you rely on. Even if you have an excellent business continuity and disaster recovery plan, do you have any plan what your important suppliers are planning to do? If one of your third-party vendors isn’t prepared, you can work with that company to improve, or look for a better supplier.
- Be flexible and compassionate with workers.
While you want to get back to work as quickly as possible, recognize that your employees may be torn between their jobs and their situations, depending on whether they were impacted at home. Flexibility will pay off if you allow workers to return to work at their own pace, or perhaps to work remotely if that’s possible following a business interruption.
