All businesses dread the thought of disaster hitting. Regardless of their size and the industry sector in which they operate, a disaster can have, let’s face it, disastrous consequences. Generally, disasters inevitably cause a period of downtime, which can impact productivity and hit the bottom line. They can even close a business for good. In fact, statistics suggest that in up to 80% of cases, a disaster striking does just that. That’s a worryingly high figure. How can you avoid the worst happening to your own small business if disaster were to strike?

Disasters can take many forms – and you don’t know when or what form it might take. There are natural disasters, such as floods or lightning strikes; disasters caused by accidents or human error, such as fires; and those caused by a deliberate, malicious act, such as a cyber-attack or terrorism.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that it is possible to take action to mitigate the impact of a disaster and, in some cases, even reduce the risk of it happening in the first place. Research has shown that businesses with a robust and well-tested disaster recovery plan have a much better chance of recovering from a disaster than those who don’t. One of the key reasons for this is that a disaster recovery plan sets out the main priorities that need addressing and allocates roles and responsibilities to a core disaster recovery team. This gives everyone a clear focus, enabling disaster recovery activity to get underway faster. In turn, this means the business is able to get back up on its feet sooner, reducing down time and minimising damage.

But, if you haven’t created a disaster recovery plan before, where do you start? It can feel quite daunting and overwhelming. For this reason, some choose to ignore the risk of disaster, preferring instead to take the view that it won’t ever happen to them. We certainly don’t advocate this approach.

Despite their lack of skills or experience, many small and medium sized business owners try to manage their own disaster recovery process, to varying degrees of success. Unless they instigate a process of continuous testing and reviewing of their disaster recovery plan, these businesses will only find out how good their disaster recovery plan actually is when disaster strikes and they have to implement it for real.

Why then do so many small business owners leave such a fundamental part of their business protection, which after all is their livelihood, to chance? It would appear it’s because they are under the misapprehension that it’s too expensive to outsource their disaster recovery process to experts.

While it’s true that the disaster recovery process that big corporate companies have is very expensive and certainly way beyond the budget of any typical SME business, there is a cost-effective solution.

First Recovery specialises in providing disaster recovery support to SMEs. Our packages are designed for smaller businesses at a cost that certainly won’t break the bank.  We offer two packages, depending on the size of your business. For smaller businesses employing up to 20 people, the cost is £625 per year. For slightly larger businesses employing between 10 and 100 people, the annual cost of our services is £895.

Our services include setting you up in alternative office premises with a bank of PCs and other essential office equipment, getting your phone and IT systems back up and running and restoring your online capability. Within just a few hours of notifying us that you have been hit by disaster, a disaster event manager arrives on site with you, to take control and guide you out of disaster. To our knowledge, no other provider out there is able to offer a comparable composite service.

Many of you may thinking that you already have this type of service in place through your business insurance.  Unfortunately, you’re probably mistaken. While your insurance will pay financial reparation, providing you have a valid claim, you won’t be offered any practical on-the-ground support. A loss adjuster may visit the site of the disaster, but this will purely be to assess the damage, not to offer any help or guidance. From experience, we know this lack of practical support from their insurer has often come as a big shock to businesses, particularly SMEs.

We like to think of First Recovery as the fourth emergency service for business. One of our experts will be by your side when you need them most. Isn’t that the level of reassurance you and your business deserve? One final point worth making. Once you have a contract with First Recovery in place, talk to your insurer. It may be possible to negotiate a cheaper premium for your business insurance because you have specialist disaster recovery protection. This will mean you can offset some of the cost and gold-plate your business protection.