Business Matters: Progress on My Business Disaster Readiness Plan

Last month I wrote about my long-overdue efforts to put in place a disaster plan for both my freelance business and my personal well-being. I’m not paranoid, mind you, but a recent spate of natural and man-made disasters has underscored my lack of control of the environment in which I run my business (including wildfires, floods, gas outages, power outages, and computer crashes). I can either deny these realities or deal with them. And so I promised to write about these topics as I formulated a business disaster readiness plan:

  1. Defining my goals for disaster planning for my business
  2. Scoping out potential business disaster scenarios and evaluating risk
  3. Setting specific actions to take for each disaster scenario weighted by risk
  4. Finding resources that could help me

After all, I expect my vendors (businesses such as OfficeMax, Dell, and my subcontractors) to have planned ahead for potential and probable disasters.

Last month I defined my goals. This month, I am reporting on my progress in scoping out potential business disaster scenarios and evaluating my risk level. In this process, I have tried to separate personal disaster from business disaster scenarios where possible; it has been hard to do that because I work in my home office.

So, fellow independent freelancers, here is the beginning of my disaster readiness matrix.

I thought the whole process, at least in the beginning, would be harder than it has been. I actually do have a lot of mitigation options in place and many others to choose from. Recently, one of my clients requested that associates sign an “Information Technology Requirements for Associates” agreement, and I took many of my options from that document, including having POTS (“Plain Old Telephone Service”) in addition to a cell phone. POTS phones plug into a telephone wall jack rather than an electrical outlet, so they work in many disaster scenarios. I already have a POTS, but it was nice to know about this option.

I recognize that “one day at a time” is a good mantra as I work through this project; I do not have to have everything in place today. It feels good to work on the matrix and continue to find options and discuss issues with other like-minded people.

If you’d like to join me as you work on your own disaster readiness plan, please contact me at efrick@textdoctor.com. I’d love to know what your plans are and share my mitigation options and the actions that I have taken (for obvious reasons, I won’t put those up on my website, but I’m happy to share everything with you personally).