Bootstrapping your disaster plans

Filed in archive Bootstrapper Resources on May 10, 2010

© Rusty Boxcars

Most small business owners know about disaster plans, think they are a fine idea, and never quite get around to putting them together. Things move fast in small businesses, it's hard to maintain a plan that will work tomorrow and six months from tomorrow... it's a whole different business and set of issues by then. And it's tough for the entrepreneurial to get into the disaster planning mode, it's true; you are thinking about all the great things you are going to do, not all the mundane bad stuff that can happen along the way. Or maybe you are; recently, Malcolm Gladwell and others suggest that the most successful entrepreneurs are hardly the tree-swinging risk-takers that they have conventionally been portrayed as, but rather innately conservative, methodical players who win not by gambling big, but by never over-committing and avoiding mistakes.

Either way, very few small businesses have formal disaster plans. Winging it, however, is not the way to go in a disaster situation, even if you don't otherwise find value in checklists and documentation (if you believe otherwise, I recommend checking out Atul Gawande's "The Checklist Manifesto" for an eye-opener). At exactly those moments when you need to be thinking clearly and not missing a single step, you're least capable of doing so. Even the smoothest, most competent, most experienced experts can't always function in such stressful scenarios. When that happens, careful plans, set down clearly and simply on hard copy, can dramatically improve your chances of recovering successfully.

While the government hasn't always provided a shining response in the wake of disasters, in this case at least you can count on them before disaster strikes: the SBA has some fine resources to get you started.