January/February 2010

Were you prepared for the economic crisis? Did you have sufficient cash reserve to keep your business afloat until sales picked up? Are you prepared for the next unexpected event?

I thought about this when reading about the earthquake in Haiti. Sadly, there was a 6.1 aftershock in Haiti today. I know our country is assisting with the relief effort, but for many of those unfortunate Haitians, it's too little, too late.

Because I live in California (earthquake territory), I started to think about what could happen here. Earthquakes and rain-induced mudslides, contrary to the Barry Manilow song, "It Never Rains in Southern California." However, the lyrics also say, "It never rains in Southern California, but girl, don't they warn ya? It pours, man, it pours." And this is the third straight day of rain, with flood waters in a nearby town up to the neck.

In our business of writing, editing, and publishing MBE magazine, all of us can work at home and access the office computers. What with the ongoing rain and thunderstorms here, it's a good time to exercise that option. But today I received an early morning call from a member of our staff, saying that all of her e-mail files, as well as all of her documents, had disappeared from her computer - the repository for our sales records.

Next the fire alarm inspector for our 28-unit complex knocked on my door (I still hadn't gotten out of the house) and he discovered that two new smoke detectors in my home had been wired incorrectly by last year's inspector.

The next call was from another employee saying he was unable to access his computer from home. It's the high-performance machine with all the editorial files, graphics layouts, and finished pages. He then headed to the office, dreading the possibility that we had lost everything.

I went online to my office computer and saw an error message saying that the backup of my machine could not be done. Fortunately, our computer tech then went online from his office to research the problem via remote control. Apparently our automated backup system (a nightly event) had failed during the process, probably due to a power outage which zapped all the office computers.

Were we prepared? We thought so, but apparently not. I do realize, that in the world at large, there are major disasters resulting in loss of lives, but the loss computer data, for most of us business owners could mean the loss of our livelihood, at least temporarily.

We got lucky. There was no fire before the smoke detectors were rewired. The e-mails had all moved to the deleted messages file, and that file was intact. The lost backup was retrieved from the server. The graphics computer had been hit by a power surge, but no files were lost. And now, I'm looking into cloud computing. At the very least, we need to have a secondary backup in another location.

And if there is a fire? A roof leak? A tornado or hurricane? A computer virus? Are we ready? It's likely that most of you have much more to lose if your business sustains a crisis. Machinery. Real estate. Electronic data. Much more than a few easily replaced computers. I am thankful that everything has been resolved here. There are plenty of minority-owned and woman-owned firms that consult on disaster preparedness. And I am hopeful that you will consult one of them. I know that we will.

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