Business Disaster Planning for the Work at Home Mom

Most corporations are required by auditors and/or insurance companies to carry a business continuity plan, or a BCP. A BCP is a disaster recovery plan, or a contingency plan that describes how a business will recover in the event of a natural, human or technical disaster.

Examples of such disasters would include earthquakes and tornadoes (natural); burglary and data theft (human); computer virus and power outage (technical).

Ok, but I'm a work at home mom and my business consists of a makeshift office in the spare bedroom. What does business continuity have to do with me? Everything! If you're dedicated to your business, then you've worked hundreds if not thousands of hours collecting data on customers, creating mailing lists, business contacts and more. You've created spreadsheets for tracking income and expenses. Perhaps the backup for your website resides on your computer.

Do you have a backup plan in the event that you would lose all or part of that information?

Disasters don't happen at convenient times, quite the opposite in fact. They happen a day before your big show. They happen an hour before your network meeting. Are you prepared? How much would an unscheduled disruption cost your business?

If nothing else, creating a business continuity plan will give you the opportunity to evaluate any potential risk to your business. Once you determine your risk, you can put a plan of action into motion.

Here's a real life example. In November of 2007 I was preparing for a large women's exposition. The night before the event, I turned on my PC only to discover that it had completely lost power. After several hours trying to resuscitate it, my only option was to purchase a new PC. Because my old hard drive was not compatible with my new PC, I was unable to recover any of my data for the expo. I was awake nearly all night recreating from scratch order forms and other documentation.

Lesson learned. The next week I invested in an external USB hard drive and now I regularly back up all my data. I also sat down and created a business continuity plan for my home business.