Implementing Survival Strategies

 

  • After a hurricane, decisions must be reached as to whether or when to resume your business.
  • This is the time to review your input to the element "Developing Survival Strategies".
  • Based on these post-disaster business strategies, you should evaluate the impact of the current disaster on your business, your customers, your vendors and suppliers, and on the community in general.
  • Even though you will be under a lot of stress and pressure in a totally chaotic situation, this evaluation must be made and will be crucial in determining the future of your business.
  • When a major disaster affects you, your financial survival depends on how well you make these evaluations and decisions in the changed environment.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How do I relate my strategies to my current state after the disaster?
Now is the time to review the strategies that you developed early on in your planning process. These strategies were, hopefully, developed at a time when you were able to clearly think through all of the potential scenarios and make determinations regarding the future of your business. You must now assess the situation as it exists and apply those strategies to the situation at hand.
 
Even though I have a strategy, what variables might I face after a disaster?
Research conducted at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay concludes that there are at least five key variables central to the survival of a small business following a disaster. They are:
  • the extent to which your customers are adversely affected by the disaster;
  • the amount of your business's goods or services customers can defer, replace with others, or acquire elsewhere without significant increases in cost;
  • current trends within a specific industry and your business's position within that industry;
  • the degree to which your business loses critical production, inventory, or capital assets; and
  • your ability to adapt to changes in the post disaster environment.
One of the most important variables in the survival equation is the extent to which you recognize and adapt to changing circumstances. If you are aware that things change after a disaster and that a community will never get "back to normal" and you respond quickly and appropriately, you will have an excellent chance of survival and long-term viability. If you continue "business as usual" practices, assuming the community will return to its prior state, experience suggests that you may have the odds stacked against you.

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