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:
- Defining my goals for disaster planning for my business
- Scoping out potential business disaster scenarios and evaluating risk
- Setting specific actions to take for each disaster scenario weighted by risk
- 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).