Small Business Checklist: Top Five Tips for Avoiding Disaster

 This is the first of a series of weekly posts giving hints and tips to small, home & micro business owners.

• When disaster strikes: It is always a rare occurrence, but anything can happen when you least expect. 
• Evaluate your insurance needs: It is never worth taking the risk of not insuring every aspect of your business. You cannot predict when a disaster may occur and the form it may take. 
• Establish a line of credit: You do not need to use the line, but it is useful to have access to it when you are faced with disruption to your business. The cash can be repaid as soon as you get through the turbulent period. 
• Have a plan in place: This can be a few pages worth of key contacts and information or a huge manual with detailed instructions on what should be done in the event of emergency – it is important for you and your employees to have something in place to guide them through the worst. 
• Keep Documents Stored Safely: You could use the Document Storage built into OnlineOffice in order to ensure their safety.

5 Responses to “ Small Business Checklist: Top Five Tips for Avoiding Disaster ”

1. TigerTom
   
   Said on June 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm

   “Put your egges in different baskets”, would be my advice, online and off. Break up your essential goods and store them in different places and have two sets of backups stored in different locations; paper or electronic, it’s the same.

   A lot of people have found recently, for example, that having most of your money in shares or property alone is a bad idea.

   One poor chap committed suicide after 100,000 of his customers websites got erased because he didn’t react in time to a hack warning about the software used to set up the sites. And, because the were owner-run VPS sites, there were no backups for many of them.

2. TeddyT.
   
   Said on June 30th, 2009 at 7:03 pm

   Thanks for your expert tips.

3. Rachelle C.
   
   Said on July 1st, 2009 at 11:37 am

   I have always wanted to start a business but I am afraid it would fail. Thanks for this blog!

   Rachelle C.
   FreedomBusinessSystem.com

4. Leaflet Distribution
   
   Said on July 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am

   I think the first line of defence would be to try to reduce the risk of the disaster happening in the first place, I feel sure that any time spent reducing the risk would be much less than having to deal with the consequences if it did happen.

5. Ksenija from Unusual Business
   
   Said on July 2nd, 2009 at 8:56 pm

   Dear Stefan, the tips are great! In times of economic crisis (such as we have now) these advices should form the base of every small business.

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