Are You Prepared With Plan 'B'?

Your house is on fire!!! You might recall this title of a post I did back in March of 2016. the article was written from an insurance perspective and dealt with being prepared for a catastrophic accident in your home, like your house catching fire and burning down, with loss of contents and personal items. Devastating without a doubt, and not easy to deal with in any manner, but certainly less stressful if a person has good coverage with an insurer with a solid claims handling reputation. Also, much easier to sort out if you've followed our recommendations and took measures to record all your household items and contents on paper and backed it up with photos and videos. After a fire, you'll be hard pressed to remember everything you might have owned and a list will certainly help, plus it just makes the entire claims process flow so much easier and faster.

Of course, since I also deal in commercial insurance here at BlueCircle, the same would be true for anyone who suffered a catastrophic loss to their business, with a fire or flood, or even under the circumstances of a loss of electricity, major equipment breakdown, or a labour issue that held up production. Paraphrasing some information sent over from one of our premiere providers, Intact Insurance, here are some of their suggestions to help keep your business from suffering in the event of some sort of interruption.

Would your business survive a fire, or other catastrophe?

Having proper insurance coverage for your business is just as important as for your home, and coverage for standard things like equipment breakdown and business interruption, plus the newest type of coverage available for cyber risk, is so critical in this day and age, what with all the problems created by hacking, website 'kidnapping', and computer terrorism. All good but, again, to avoid the potential loss of business and the stress of dealing with these related matters, our friends and insurance experts over at Intact Insurance,offer a few simple steps you can take to minimize the damage so to speak and get things back in order as soon as possible. This is the Plan 'B' mentioned in the post heading, a contingency plan to get you over the humps should disaster ever strike.

Intact Insurance Company's Loss Prevention team has created a tip sheet to share with customers about the steps they can take now to develop a contingency plan in case of disruption, all revolving around the question of what would.happen if the building that housed the business operations was destroyed. Think about...
o First steps to take in the event of a catastrophe?
o Important first contacts and contact details
o Where important records are stored and how they can be accessed?
o What information needs to go to customers or stakeholders, and how to reach them?

The idea is to identify the potential risks to your business and rate them based on likelihood and impact, with the ‘worst case scenario’ as the foundation. Check out my next post titled "Tips For Preparing Your Plan 'B', and get started on developing your own contingency plans tailored for your specific business.