As business owners, not only must we think of securing our homes, but we have the added stress of securing our businesses as well. The two go hand in hand for without a place to continue conducting business, our personal lives would suffer greatly.

In preparation for any disaster, every company should have a disaster plan. The depth and magnitude of your company’s plan will depend on how large your company is and how many people you have employed.

Do you have inventory to protect?
Trucks to store?
Refrigeration to save?
Spoilage, documents, office equipment, etc. to worry about?

It's a lot to consider.

Catalogs.com is relatively lucky. We purposely have our servers in mid- America, in a galaxy far far away from tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. We are an internet company, so our computers and servers mean everything to us. Not only do we have them in one area, but they are backed up in a completely different state as back-up. We back up our back ups, and then back them up some more for good measure. At Catalogs.com, we got back.

Hurricane Ike is heading straight for South Florida. As opposed to the popular political slogans of old, I do not like Ike. Ike isn't making life very easy for us. As a company today, we prepared and gathered emergency contacts, made sure we knew everyone’s significant other (or families) contacts info. We will clean up our desk areas (good excuse, long time overdue) and raise our computers above the floor.

We will put into place back-up plans to work from home, have extra laptops, and most importantly, back up our individual work computers and take the back-up OFF PREMISE. As I said before, baby got back up.

Running a company depends on being calm, planning for the good, the bad and the ugly, and most importantly … showing concern for your employees. Without them, we would not have a company. Together, we will send Ike packing.

Be safe!