Now that winter is over, it might be tempting to believe that your business is safe from the weather, especially if you live in the Northeast or Midwest.  It makes sense as winter was very tough this year, and many places experienced record snowfall, causing businesses to close or lose business.  While the winter certainly is no picnic, with its snow, sleet and blizzards, the fact of the matter is that Mother Nature can strike any time of the year, causing destruction in its path.

This spring, we’ve already experienced an earthquake in LA, tornado threats in the Midwest, and a late snowstorm in the Northeast.  This summer, it’s always possible that there could be wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, severe thunderstorms and more.  And let’s not forget that winter will be back next year.  Needless to say you’ll need to be prepared all year round if a natural disaster strikes.  Here are several things to keep in mind:

Animation ~What a Disaster~ by George, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Do You Have an IT Business Continuity Plan?

One of the best ways to make sure your business can run smoothly in the event of an emergency is to do disaster recovery testing.  If you own your own server and have an IT environment in place in-house, make a point to do periodic testing of your disaster recovery planning to ensure you won’t experience an outage.  If you source your IT in the cloud or through a managed hosting solution, ask them what their continuity testing consists of.  Remember to backup all of your files, so your data isn’t lost if an outage does occur.

Review Your Insurance Policy

If you haven’t looked at your insurance policy, now is the time to do so.  You can protect yourself if you experience a major event and need money right away.  Many businesses suffered a rude awakening after Sandy when they realized that they didn’t have the correct hurricane insurance or the expenses they incurred did not cover the deductible.  If you do find that you need money and can’t wait for an insurance payment on your claim, take a look at the small business loans providers out there to see if one will work with you and get you money promptly at a decent rate.

Have a Contingency Plan in Effect for Your Employees

Remember all of those fire drills you had as a kid in school?  While they probably seemed like a great respite from the daily grind of math class or gym, they did theoretically serve a point.  In the unlikely but possible event that there was a fire at your school, students and teachers would have a plan in place to get out of the school in the least chaotic fashion possible.  Same thing applies with a contingency plan at work.  In the event of a natural disaster, people could get very anxious.  The Small Business Administration recommends that you take the time to create a plan with your employees, so people know who to call and the procedure if an event does occur.