Your business sits on the Gulf of
Mexico and provides a spectacular
view of the water. A prime location until hurricane season, when you and
your company are at the mercy of
Mother Nature.
Business insurance will help replace
property lost in a natural disaster. But
does your company have a plan to help
keep your business up and running in
the short term?
“A continuity plan’s function is to ensure
an organization continues to make money
even if there’s some type of disruption to
the business,” says Joel Foxworth, Senior
Business Relationship Manager and vice
president at Wells Fargo in Houston. “The
business owner should look at the plan
periodically, at least annually, and update
it when necessary.”
Smart Business asked Foxworth about
how a business owner should develop a
plan and who to talk to for guidance.
Are employees more involved these days in
the development of a business continuity
plan?
I believe so, especially after we saw
how much Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita disrupted everything. My
office is located 30 miles from the Gulf
Coast, and when Hurricane Rita blew in a
few years ago, we saw our continuity plan
in action. We had hundreds of employees
located all over Texas as well as other
states and the bank had to figure out how
to continue to do business. Our company
had a plan in place and was able to take
care of everybody. I know from this event
that myself and other employees within
our organization have become more
involved in developing and knowing the
current continuity plan.
Can natural disasters be as disruptive to
businesses as terrorist attacks?
There’s some similarity between the two
in that they continue to affect how business owners are changing the way they do
business. I think Sept. 11 was a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was this generation’s Pearl Harbor. It was such a unique time in this
country’s history that it would be hard to
compare it to a hurricane. Just due to the
number of lives lost and the level of
tragedy, I don’t think the two could compare.
Who should a business owner talk to about
setting up a business continuity plan?
Employers today should receive
greater engagement from their employees to help them understand what’s critical and why their companies function
the way they do. Every company is going
to have a different continuity plan. One
company may be heavy on the supply
chain and distribution and another may
be strictly IT.
Depending on the size of your business
you would want to talk to your IT
department. If you are a regional or
national company, you probably have
remote servers and multiple locations
where if one went down you would have
others that could easily take its place.
Your mom-and-pop companies’ IT servers migh be a laptop computer.
Everything depends on the scope and
size of your business and its function.
Small and mid-sized companies that
have an IT department as well as a
human resources department need to
engage both in the development of a
continuity plan as well as your company
leaders and executives.
How can a business continuity plan help in
the time of a crisis?
When Hurricane Rita hit, it was critical
that my clients had my cell phone number
since I’m their banker. When power was
knocked out in a 100-mile radius, a lot of
people needed to be able to get cash to pay
contractors. When you don’t have power,
you can’t have a security system on, and
the bank won’t open its doors to distribute
cash unless it has a secured facility. It was
critical that we be able to get generators to
the banks, to get contracts to the customers and be able to find ways to make
cash available to them.
Do businesses of all sizes need to develop a
business continuity plan?
I really think all business owners
should have some type of game plan so
that they can continue to operate in case
of a disruption. Three hurricanes in the
past few years gave us the precedent
that if we should ever have another hurricane or other natural disaster, we have
planned for how it would affect our
course of action. This year we had
Hurricane Humberto form in just 18
hours. It happened so quickly we didn’t
have time to evacuate. Overall, in the
past five years, we’ve had to evacuate
the area on three different occasions.
That’s when you need a strong plan in
place. <<
JOEL FOXWORTH is Senior Business Relationship Manager and vice president at Wells Fargo. Reach him at (409) 861-6369 or
[email protected].