The Daylight Savings Updaters have been discussed a lot in the Virtual Assistant community the past few days. Along with allergies, it seems this Spring’s little office hiccup should now have been resolved by the vigilant self-employed home-office population. Spring time is a good time to pause and consider other risks to the health and security of your business.

Whether or not your company has an actual Risk Management program in place, you’ll want to at least have a plan of action should something occur that forces you out of your workplace for awhile.

If you have a solid back up plan for your data files AND a good insurance plan in place, you have taken the first steps to securing your business in times of trouble. But even if you can restore data, and or replace carpeting/roof/furniture lost in a natural disaster, there will be a period of time during which you’re facing a big huge mess and it’s hard to conduct business under those circumstances.

Some seasonal risk factors where I live and work include:

• Spring storm power outages: conducting work with NO power speaks for itself.
• Wind storms: these seem to take cable service, and therefore email access offline for awhile where I live. If I hear the wind blowing at night, the next morning it’s almost guaranteed that there will be some downtime.
• Plumbing backups: spring root growth can cause this to happen anywhere, but if it happens in the place where you conduct business, what will your clients do while you are mopping up? Or what will you do if the contents of bottom drawers of your file cabinets and your carpeting are destroyed? Yuck!
• Wildfires: where I live, it’s hot and dry early, before summer arrives. The drought we’ve experienced has conspired to create high fire hazards in the warm months. We’ve had immediate evacuation orders hit in the area and you can imagine what that does to someone’s family and worklife.
• Skunkage: If skunks wander where you live this could happen to you. One year we had to move out for a month after a skunk got into our crawl space and died there. We spent hours trying to find it and remove it, after which the mop-up included going through every item in our house (jewelry, clothing, belts, shoes furniture, carpet, dishes, doorknobs, EVERYTHING) trying to either figure out what chemical would remove the smell or if the item had to be discarded. The scent was so embedded even in our vehicles, that we couldn’t go anywhere wearing any of the clothing that we owned. It sounds funny now, but it was an enormously frustrating and challenging mishap.

Now, some of these risk factors are preventable. For instance, we have a twice-a-year maintenance service on our sewer lines. We also (now!) make sure that the access to our crawl space is completely closed off. Cleaning out gutters minimizes problems with unexpected ceiling leaks. None of my camera equipment bags are ever stored on the floor. And if I hear thunder, I unplug EVERYTHING, even though we have surge protectors all over our home and offices.

Part of managing your risks is having a Crisis Response Plan. These will be the steps you’ll take if your home office does experience some kind of disaster. Consider the following steps, and tailor them to your business and your geographic locale. Write them down and file in several places: in a file called “My Business Risk Management Plan” and “Business Crisis Response Plan,” and wherever you store vital records that you would grab if you had to exit your home in a hurry (that’s another subject for another post!). Here are examples of items you might have on your Crisis Response Plan list:

• Forward calls from your office to your cell phone if you will have to relocate for awhile.
• Establish alternative web-based email addresses that you can use if you need to go somewhere else to work.
• Keep a set of suitable work attire & accessories set aside for any face-to-face client meetings or network events which you may need to attend.
• Identify alternative meeting places to which you can shift any previously scheduled meetings.
• Use a sync-able web-based calendar, in case your computer or Day Planner is damaged or lost.
• Do some damage control by using your answering maching or website to explain any service downtime for clients trying to reach you.
• Pair up with another self-employed colleague who may be willing to assist you if you
  experience down time.