Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Information

Wrapping Our Head Around Catastrophic Loss and the Business Community

When you think about catastrophic loss from extreme incidents (tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, etc.) we generally think about homes lost and have the imagery ingrained in our minds of people wandering through rubble. While loss of home and personal property itself causes extreme economic hardship, perhaps even more threatening to the economic stability of an area is the loss of businesses. Think about it this way, all of the people who lost their homes will need money to replace what has been lost. We get money primary through the jobs we have. If the jobs we have are gone because the same catastrophic incident took out our place of work, indefinitely, how will we get the money we need to recover?

As worker bees in the labor force, we sometimes fall victim to ascribing to the notion that whomever we work for "has money because they’re a business and that many businesses just don't want to spend any." This may be the case for large, multi-national companies; however this is most definitely faulty logic for local companies and small businesses. In 2012, a report from the Small Business Administration put small businesses making up 99.7% of U.S. employer firms1. That leads us to ask, then, what's small business? Well, currently, the Federal Code of Regulations Title 13, Part 121 (§121.201) has a list of what that means broken down by employee number or annual receipt maximums, and separated by NAICS code. Here's an example - a General Freight Trucking Company who only transports locally has a maximum annual receipt cap of $27.5 Million. Yes, that's Million.

A small business, such as this trucking company, would likely be devastated by a catastrophic incident. That means people will lose jobs, tax revenue will be lost, etc. and that makes difficulties already attributed to recovery efforts that much harder.

 

Planning is the Key to Preparedness and Preparedness is Fundamental to Recovery

Since small business carry the brunt of the labor force but get hit the hardest by disasters (some never opening their doors back up) it's incredibly important to plan out preparedness activities and act on those preparedness functions so that the recovery process is a quick as possible. There are plenty of tools out there to get started, below is a FEMA website with a list of reviewable materials:

https://www.fema.gov/media-library/resources-documents/collections/344

Other activities to take on could be striving to take part in the FEMA - PS-PrepTM program, which is the Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness Accreditation and Certification Program. More information can be found at this website:

https://www.fema.gov/voluntary-private-sector-preparedness-program-ps-pr...


As always, if you'd like to reach and speak with your local Emergency Managers, just call the office at 330.297.3607

 

Reference

1. https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf