Hurricane Matthew misses South Florida – were you ready?
We got very lucky as Hurricane Matthew missed us in October, yet, it was a good wake-up call for all of us to prepare and look at our emergency procedures. As much as we all do to prepare, what I believe many companies forget is that there are 3 completely separate ways you must prepare for a hurricane:
- Business – your business must be prepared to shutdown, continue to operate and restart. There are a lot of ways to do this and it is good to create a procedures manual if you do not have one on what to do, when to do it, and who does what.
- Personal – You need to have your own plan – do you have supplies such as water, food, batteries, etc.? How do you get your shutters up if you have them? Do you have a place to go?
- Employees – the one part of hurricane preparedness that I believe is overlooked is making sure your employees are prepared, and that you have provided them sufficient time to make their own personal preparations. One thing that we saw during Matthew is that gas supplies dried up very quickly, and that by the time businesses started shutting down or letting employees off – they were not able to find gas for vehicles, generators or other needs.
ComRes can help protect your business by moving your phone system to the cloud with our CloudTalk VoIP, backing up your existing phone system, providing a backup cloud-based phone solution, and going over disaster plans and procedures with you. In the days leading up to Hurricane Matthew, several of our customers were contacting our service department to help prepare for any loss of service, backing up systems, and invoking emergency measures.
