What’s essential?

With the bushfires and floods, the global financial crisis and swine flu, every business should be thinking about having contingency plans in place. I gave some tips on preparing for a distruption to your business and being prepared, but real contingency planning requires even more effort.

A key step in ensuring your business can survive a major issue is understanding what is essential. Protecting and replacing the essential is what helps you survive – other things may be important  but are of little use if the essential factors are missing.

For example, it is important to have the Word Constructions website online but it is essential that I have a computer and software for preparing documents (yes, I can write with pen and paper but it isn’t very professional to hand that to a client!)

So what is essential in your business? Think about the essential equipment, skills, people, services and resources you rely on.

Imagine a dentist’s surgery without a dentist, an engineering firm with no engineers, a dressmaker business with no sewing machine, a hairdresser with no scissors and a referral agency missing its directories.

Make a list of what is essential for your business, and perhaps a second list of what is very important but non-essential.