The steps to planning for a crisis.
Having a plan ready for the crisis your business is facing is important. What are the steps to planning for a crisis you ask? Well, let us list them down.
1.Make a Risk Mitigation Plan (R&M) crisis plan
- List down and prioritize your resources.
- Identify the various potential crisis you may face in the future that threatens your resources.
- Figure out the problems you are facing if they are internal/external. What can you control and what can’t you control, list them down.
- If the impact is only felt by the business or within the industry you are in
- Estimate the impact of the crisis on your business. That is the potential impacts, ie lose in sales, customer dissatisfaction increased costs.
- Consider the actions to take to mitigations & protect the business.
2.Review the business strategy in light of the R&M plan
Business Strategy
- Review the workforce locations.
- Revisit your crisis and continuity plan
- Evaluate the supply chain
- Identify the potential points of failure
- Get the communication right
3.Stay on top of your money
Financial Planning
- You have to make a budget – having a monthly budget is essential to keep track of .
- Take stock of your non – cash assets and maximize their value.
- Do a proper maintenance on everything.
- Diversification of income – paying down your debt.
- Having insurance.
- Having a war chest account that is (money market/ fixed deposit to put in your savings).
4.Having a Crisis Communication Strategy & plan ready
Sales and Marketing
- Use tactics to market & thrive despite troubled times.
- Get your email marketing right.
- Stay upto date on new opportunities. Be ready for new opportunities and take them in.
- Drive business goals using SEO ie (Search Engine Optimization) – the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website/a web page to users of a web search engine.
- Try unconventional social media channels for B2B (business to business) marketing and B2C (business to customer).
- Finally rethink your strategy.
Planning all this makes you able to stay on top of your crisis game your business is facing just makes it easier for you.
Next you will need to know the steps to managing the crisis and that is:
- Accept it
- Share it
- Transfer it
- Reduce it
- Eliminate it
- Exploit it
So once you have finally understood what planing for crisis is and how you can go about it in your business, helps you to know that you don’t have to stop running your business, identify & prioritze your resources, pinpoint key risks, draft a contingency plan, table top them, distribute and train, maintain the plans, run drills and stay vigilant.
And remember those who fail to plan, plan to fail!