Johan

How to Prepare for a Crisis (Even If It Never Happens)

More than likely, you may never deal with a crisis in your business. However, it’s always better to be prepared than having to deal with a crisis with no thought or idea of how to do it. It may seem like a negative to think about this before it happens, but you’ll be glad you did because it’ll make overcoming the crisis much easier and more likely.

Make a List of Potential Crises

For each business owner, this will be slightly different. If you have a home business, you may want to include any type of crisis that would affect your ability to do business, even if it’s not business related.

Create Response Templates for Each Issue

Now that you know the types of crisis that might affect your business, take the time to create a response template for each issue. You may be able to locate templates on MS Office via Word and Excel to help give you some ideas about it. Mainly you want to go through what to do for every single element of each crisis, from PR to physically fixing equipment. Whatever it takes.

Inventory Your Assets

If you don’t even know what you have, it’ll be hard to replace it if disaster strikes. Take pictures of your assets and create an online inventory of everything it takes to run your business – from software to physical equipment like smartphones, laptops, and printers. Whatever you have you’ll want to note with a picture, a description, and a copy of the purchase receipt.

Keep All Stakeholders Informed

Know exactly what your plans are for communicating with your stakeholders. Whether they are investors, customers, or they work with you, know how you’ll keep the lines of communication open should a crisis occur.

Remember PR

Don’t forget that continuing to promote your business positively during a crisis is imperative in order to be able to overcome it with a business still intact. Don’t stop your usual promotions (unless you need to due to finances) when something happens.

Stay Transparent

Whether you’re talking to the press, your customers, or posting on social media about the crisis, be sure to always stay open, honest and transparent. Even the appearance of stonewalling can be a PR nightmare for a small business owner.

Create Backups of Everything

Whether it’s software, or data, or websites… whatever you use for your business needs to stay backed up. You’ll want to have redundant backups of everything so that if one method goes down, you’ll have the other.

Create a Vendor Response List

One document that is important is to know how to contact everyone who works with you, especially vendors. For example, do you know how to call your payment processor if you did not have access to your computer or your smartphone directly? Can you sign in from any computer from anywhere to get a list of your vendors, account information, and so forth so you can deal with it?

Give Power of Attorney to the Right People

What happens to your business and the people you work with if you are not available at all for whatever reason? Is there someone you can give POA to that can work for your business’s benefit if you’re unavailable due to the crisis?

Crisis preparation is key. Take the time to get the information together that you’d need if something happens. That way, you’re ready to take on the problem from day one instead of trying to invent a way at the last minute for dealing with it. Whether the crisis is one of PR or one of a natural disaster, with planning you can ensure you come through it with flying colors.

How Women Can Learn to Use Graceful Flow for Success in Life

Many business women make the mistake of thinking that they have to abandon their feminine side and embrace all things masculine in order to get ahead in business. The truth is that no matter what job or industry you are working in, you will never be truly successful and happy in your career if you are pretending to be something that you’re not.

You might think the role of hard-headed businessman is the only way to succeed in top companies, but most businesses have more than enough of this type. Their masculine energy rides roughshod over anyone who doesn’t meet their exacting, and often unrealistically high standards. It also silences any disagreement or any creative thinking that might come into conflict with their vision of how things “should” be done.

Feminine energy is a lot less action oriented. It is softer, more creative and flexible. Feminine energy goes with the flow. It doesn’t try to redirect the river.

The Idea of Graceful Flow

The idea of flow is that everything should come to us naturally, without us chasing all over the place after things we think will make us happier, more successful, more… whatever. Flow is about accepting what is good in life without wanting more or pushing it away because we think we don’t deserve it. It is also about attracting the good things in life through correct action. If we work hard on a project, for example, good results will follow.

Flow is also about a vision of how things can be better, but organically. If you want to grow a wonderful rose, you can’t keep tugging at it to make it grow faster. The result would just cause it to wither and die on the vine.

The Secret of the Secret

The very popular book The Secret resonated with a lot of people who wanted to learn more about abundance and flow. It is also commonly termed the law of attraction. Instead of exhausting yourself chasing after all the things you want, you can take actions that will make those good things come to you. The result is a lot less stress and a great deal more success and satisfaction.

A lot of business people get so caught up in the idea of more – more customers, money, and profits – that they fail to appreciate what they actually have. They get so stressed that their health starts to fail. They also say or do unskillful things which result in poor relationships in the workplace, and unhappy clients who go to businesses who will treat them better.

The Pareto Principle tells us that 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your profits. Graceful flow in this case would therefore mean nurturing these relationships as much as possible to sustain them over the long term.

The energy can be directed in a positive, purposeful way, with laser focus – not negative, aimless and anxious. Graceful flow will bring success without having to stress over it, for more harmony and balance within the company, the business community at large, and within yourself as a woman entrepreneur.