How resilient is your small business?
Keeping a small business humming when unexpected events occur can be stressful. Imagine if three of your five staff are away sick on the same day, or your office gets flooded, or you experience a security issue.
We know an event will have a serious impact on our ability to deliver to our customers, communicate with each other, and may have a big impact on our finances and reputation we’ve worked so hard to build.
At Mindshift we prepare for the worst possible scenario, hoping it never happens, but feeling reassured that if something out of the ordinary did hit us, we would be in a good position to keep our business ticking along.
We have applied these guidelines to our business.
1) Back up everything! Our team should be able to quickly pick up a colleagues work in progress and take it to completion as they should be able to easily find files.
2) Be transparent with customers. People will understand if something will be a little later than expected.
3) Have an incident response plan. This is the plan you’ll follow in the event of a disruption to your business. Document how you’ll communicate internally and externally, make your staff aware of the plan, and practice it.
4) Use a password manager to keep passwords safely in one place and enable secure password sharing if needed.
5) Be as open as possible with staff about what’s happening with the business – your pipeline, 90-day goals, conversations with customers etc. If you’re a business owner and you’re away, your team can carry on – no surprises.
6) Have great planning! This is essential for a small team to support each other, making the most of the working hours, and to deliver the best work for customers.
7) Document your key business processes including payroll, GST, accounts payable. If your fabulous office manager / administrator is away, even the most admin-adverse business owner can do the all-important payroll.
8) Ensure your team have the skills needed to step in for their colleagues if need be, or at least do their best.
9) Use Teams to communicate with each other and customers. Less email and conversations and files are easily found and shared.
10) Set up a WhatsApp or Signal chat group for emergencies. These platforms are likely to be more readily available than Teams chat or text messaging in times of crisis.
