Business continuity – 5 business ‘killers’ that could destroy your company

Without getting into reputation damage, product failure, or an employee stealing your clients, there are five areas to be aware of that could badly affect your small business.

And they are all based on some destructive impact on or to your premises.

Some of these could affect you even if you run a home-based business.

In many respects, they could hit you harder – if you lose your home and business premises in a single incident, your life will be harder to get back on track.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) involves anticipating problems that could affect the normal day-to-day business and having a plan to deal with them.

So here is Bytestart’s review of five of the most dangerous business killers and what you can do to prevent them from bringing down your business.

Fire

A fire may be the most devastating event that can affect a business. Even small fires can have a widely destructive effect because of the wide reach of toxic smoke and the water damage inflicted by putting the fire out. This category also includes other destructive forces, such as lightning or a vehicle striking your building.

You must always ensure you have an adequate contents insurance policy to protect your business. If you work from home, make sure you tell your insurer so your business contents are covered.

Don’t underestimate the costs of starting again and buying all new furniture and computers from scratch. If you hold stock, that also needs to be protected. Of course, protecting your business from fire is easy and heavily regulated by law.

Your business premises must have a working and regularly serviced fire alarm, adequate fire extinguishers, and a fire safety plan. You cannot cut corners in this area; you must rely on the experts.

Flood

While in many ways less destructive than fire, floods have a devastating long-term effect on buildings.

Flood water is dirty and often mixed with raw sewage, so getting a building back on its feet after a flood is more than just making everywhere dry.

It also involves an intense cleaning by specialised teams and the complete replacement of fixtures and fittings in affected rooms.

Floods can also have damaging effects days after the initial water has entered the building, as damp can take a grip and move upwards many floors. So, even if your business is on the third floor, you may find your business is disrupted a few days after the ground floor has been flooded.

Get government guidance on whether your business will likely be affected by floods – and how to plan ahead – here.

There are plenty of portable flood barriers, which can be purchased online in advance of a crisis and used to protect buildings by stopping water from entering through the door. Don’t bother with sandbags, as they are not as effective, and some experts believe that once wet with dirty water, they can harbour very dangerous bacteria.

One final thing to bear in mind about flooding is that if your home and business are in the same area, in the event of a flood, you are more likely to spend time protecting your home. It’s human nature to do this. But that means the long-term effects of flooding could be more severe at your business premises as you will spend less time minimising the initial impact.

Theft

As we all know, many businesses are targeted by thieves, if only because sometimes there is a lot of valuable cash, stock or IT equipment on site they’d like to get their hands on.

Prevention is easy: Install a burglar alarm and monitor it. If the alarm goes off, a control centre will be alerted and responsible for contacting you and the police.

You could also hire a security company to survey your premises and identify weak points that would benefit from extra measures, such as bars over windows.

In your plans against theft, consider the time it will take to deal with smashed doors and windows and the possible consequences of customer data theft.

Data loss

In today’s digital era, data is the lifeblood of most businesses. Studies show that 80% of the companies that experience complete data loss shut down within a year. The reasons are clear—without access to critical data, many businesses can’t recover.

Whether your data is stolen, destroyed, or compromised, having a secure backup is essential to your business continuity plan.

Cloud-based data backup is an invaluable solution that is widely available, regardless of your business size.

It’s highly cost-effective and eliminates the need for manual intervention. Computers and servers can automatically back up data over the Internet at regular intervals—typically daily.

With automatic backups, there’s no risk of human error, such as forgetting to back up data or mishandling physical backup devices.

If disaster strikes, a secure copy of your data is always stored in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to new hardware.

Top-tier backup providers also maintain multiple copies of your data in separate locations.

This redundancy ensures that even if the provider’s data centre and your business experience a catastrophic event, another backup will always be accessible.

Malicious damage

In some respects, this can be scarier than your premises being damaged by accident. A bad employee or member of the public can cause a lot of damage to your building without a huge amount of effort.

Worse, an employee can cause a lot of data damage or steal money and assets from you.

One of the best ways to prevent this is to install CCTV monitoring, with the images monitored by a control centre for you or recorded offsite. This may act as a deterrent to the public.

Even if you have a small team of employees that you trust, it’s better to catch any bad eggs before they can do any real damage.

People with nothing to hide rarely object to CCTV being used as long as the business is open and honest about it.