How to Prepare for a Pandemic Prepare your business for the outbreak of bird flu or any other possible pandemic before you're really in trouble.
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When Hurricane Rita was headed straight for Houston last summer, Jay Steinfeld gathered his company's department managers to answer some basic questions: How will we keep filling and tracking orders? How will we work with our suppliers? What if employees can't make it to work?
The result was a 15-page road map for how Blinds.com, Steinfeld's web-based company that sells window treatments, would continue operating during a natural disaster. The company's 48 employees were given passwords to access the company network from home and a phone number to find out whose help was needed immediately after the storm. Suppliers were given backup numbers to track production schedule changes. Each employee received a copy of the plan.
Blinds.com lost only one and a half days of productivity because of the hurricane. Now its business continuity plan lies in wait for the next disaster. "Within an hour, we can have the whole company ready to go," says Steinfeld, 52, founder and CEO.
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