Common Sense Rules by Deborah Meaden

Author:Deborah Meaden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409062035
Publisher: Random House

Expect the unexpected

As you can see, there will be plenty enough going on in the day-to-day running of a business to keep any entrepreneur exceedingly busy. Once the company is up and running, it’s easy to overlook long-term initiatives in the rush to take care of the short-term issues. However, I would advise anyone to take the time to put together a disaster plan.

Every business will have to find its way through a disaster at some time or other. It could be suddenly finding out that the fruit on sale has been chemically sprayed and could poison someone. It might be a child getting severely injured in a private leisure centre. It could be any one of a thousand possibilities. The point is that every company should consider in depth what would happen in catastrophic circumstances and how it would react.

Disaster planning is not easy, but imagine making decisions and coping with the unexpected on the day that the worst happens, when everyone is panicking and staff are running around like headless chickens. It is far better for the business to consider all the issues in a cool, calm and collected manner beforehand. The trouble is, however, that many companies spend a lot of time talking about needing a recovery plan, but somehow never seem to find the time to prepare one.

The first step is to decide what would constitute a disaster for the business. Not all misfortunes will be catastrophic – someone falling over a box full of stock and breaking an arm should be covered by your insurance, for example. But there are other perils that may seriously affect the company’s fortunes – being involved in a serious incident such as a fire, chemical spillage or accidental death, for instance. Every company should sit down and try to identify their most likely catastrophic risks and their response to such an eventuality. It will not be possible to cover every risk, but the recovery plan, which will be produced as a result of this process, should be easily adapted to a range of circumstances.

At Weststar we had a document that was a step-by-step guide for anyone who was in a disastrous or catastrophic situation. It laid out the details and phone numbers of all the senior staff who had to be contacted immediately. It established an information flow and structure and instructed staff that under no circumstances were they to talk to the press and that they should instead direct all media enquiries to the general manager. The manager, in turn, was instructed on how to pass the contact through. The guide set out how and where we would deal with relatives and other people caught up in the incident. It was not a particularly complex or long document, and, as it happened, it spent most of its life on a shelf. But every year we went through it, made any revisions and updates that we thought necessary and made sure it was still relevant. Everyone in the company

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