Crisis Management for Small Business

As Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods makes its way through managing a food safety crisis, all business owners should give thought to their business’ crisis management plan. Crisis management can be defined as “a business plan of action that is implemented quickly when a negative situation occurs” (From “Crisis Management" in Encyclopedia of Small Business in enote.com). This “negative situation” could take many forms: natural disasters, embezzlement, product defects/recalls, workplace accidents/sabotage, computer viruses, etc. According to Gartner Group and quoted in the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’ document called “Basic Emergency Management Guidelines”, “43% of businesses that experience a major crisis never reopen”, and “a further 20% close within 2 years”. Good planning could help you minimize the negative impacts of a crisis.

Small Business Crisis Management

The Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP) devotes a page to small business preparedness, including links to small business disaster management resources. The website includes free templates for downloading, like a business continuity plan and a crisis communications plan. Additionally, the CCEP produces a quarterly publication called Disaster Management Canada; back issues are available on the site in pdf format.

The British website, Business Link, which offers “practical advice for business” also offers a downloadable guide to business continuity management and a guide to developing a business continuity plan.

You can find even find background information on crisis management including models and theories, success stories, lessons learned and a variety of references, further reading and external links worth exploring on Wikipedia's crisis management page.

For further reading, don’t forget to visit your local public library to check out business planning and crisis management materials for free. A search of the term “crisis management” on the Oakville Public Library’s catalogue reveals several titles worth exploring, like one written by Ian Mitroff, a leader in business crises writing, called “Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis: 7 Essential Lessons for Surviving Disaster”.

Save Money on Business Travel

Do high gas prices and airfares have you wondering how or if you’ll get that next sale or be able to meet with a supplier? The websites below might be able to help you find the cheapest airfare, accommodations or gas wherever you are.

Use Expedia.ca or Travelocity.ca to book your flight, hotel, car, activities, cruises and prepackaged vacations. In Expedia, use the Business tab for business travel deals and the use of the Travel Arranger. When searching for a hotel, don’t forget to click on the “Narrow Your Search” link beside “Hotel Amenities” to find accommodations that include things like business services (e.g. faxing, photocopying), courtesy breakfast, courtesy newspaper, high-speed internet, and room service.

Yapta.com bills itself as “Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant”. It considers itself to be “the first travel shopping Web site that integrates customized flight search results with the ability to track airfare prices and create flight-specific savings alerts in a single click”. Airfare prices from more than 30 U.S. and international (yes, it has Canadian) carriers may be checked. To try it, simply type in where and when you want to go; it checks for the closest match to your preferred departure times and airlines, lowest price, fewest stops, and shortest duration but you also get to see all matches.

Check out GasBuddy.com if you are looking to find the cheapest place to buy gas in North America. Motorists provide the prices for the site. (If you live or are traveling in Ontario, you can go directly to its OntarioGasPrices.com website.)

SmartMoney.com’s Travel Guide includes a section on business travel (e.g. “Biz Travel Secrets”), city guides and related money-saving travel articles and videoclips.

While not devoted to business travel, web 2.0 travel tools is a blog “devoted to creating a list of web 2.0 websites and webtools that are, in some way, related to Travel and Tourism”.

Travel Agents and Corporate Discounts

Don’t forget about going to a travel agent because not all the best deals are available online. Travel agents negotiate volume discounts and are able to pass on these savings to their clients. Also, set up corporate accounts and join frequent guest programs with hotel chains to receive discounts. When booking travel, you and your employees should always ask for a corporate travel discount.

Save Travel Money with Online Desktop Sharing Tools

Do you really need to travel to meet with prospective clients, suppliers or colleagues? Consider using online communication tools that might help you save precious money and time; many are free or low-cost. Here’s a link back to a recent blog post that I wrote in April 2008 called “Online Desktop Sharing for Small Business”.