When something goes wrong in your life it can often cause damage to many areas of your business. Whether it’s a problem related to your business or something in your personal life that impacts your ability to do business there are ways to limit the extent of the damage and to start rebuilding quickly. If you have a Virtual Assistant that you’ve worked with in the past, or even if you’re just someone who uses cloud services more than desktop solutions, you might find that what starts out as a minor disaster turns out to be just an inconvenience.
The types of disaster you are most likely to suffer can generally be classified as either Minor or Serious:
Some minor issues could be:
- A few hours delay due to localised problems
- Short term illness (flu etc.)
- Illness within your family
- Short term building problems (i.e.: the phone’s out, no electricity etc.)
- Critical files that have been lost or corrupted
More serious issues include:
- Long term illness (serious illness, injury)
- Loss of key staff
- The need to care for a seriously ill family member
- Long term building problems (fire, flood etc.)
- Data loss
Some of the ways a Virtual Assistant can step up and help out if you suffer a problem are:
For Minor issues a Virtual Assistant can:
- Calling clients to advise you’re running late
- Contacting your clients and rescheduling appointments
- Answer your phones and check your emails and respond where necessary
- Clearing space on your calendar for things where foreknowledge is available (i.e.: scheduled gas or electricity outages)
- Restoring a data file from backup
For Serious issues a Virtual Assistant can:
- Booking tradesman
- Finding new office space
- Finding locums or temps
- Finding temporary office space
- Re-entering data from scratch
More importantly, before you have problems, a Virtual Assistant can help you with some preventive measures that will make your life a little easier if you are ever struck by disaster. The preventive measures don’t need to be complex, but to be effective they do need to be comprehensive and documented before disaster hits.
Some of the Preventive Measures a Virtual Assistant can help with are:
- Making a disaster plan
- Sourcing solutions for potential problems
- Schedule regular backups
- Organising offsite storage, as well as possibly being an offsite storage site for backups if you don’t want to back up to the cloud
- A fresh eye to look for potential problems in your business
- Research insurance policies & companies and compile documentation for policies.
Most importantly, once you do have a complete disaster manual, make sure that there are copies available to all key staff. I’d suggest a master copy stored on Dropbox/Google Docs or similar as well as copies accessible by the CEO / GM, Virtual Assistant and/or Office Manager as well as any supervisory staff on their tablets/ laptops/ smartphone or some other technology not stored in the office or on the company servers. A printed copy taken home is preferable to a copy only accessible online at work, even though it won’t necessarily be 100% updated because a disaster plan is useless if it’s in the building that just burnt down.
