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I have a healthy dose of paranoia.
Some people hear that and think it sounds negative, but it has served me incredibly well throughout my career.
I've never operated under the assumption that everything is going to go perfectly. Honestly, I don't know where people learn that mindset because I've never seen it happen.
It probably comes from growing up on a farm.
When I was a kid, disaster wasn't something that happened to someone else. It happened to us.
We had fires, droughts, floods, tornadoes, and farm accidents to highlight a few. The picture with this article is our family barn. It had the side sucked out of it twice by tornadoes and was then burned down earlier this year.
Every year seemed to bring a new challenge that threatened everything my family had worked for.
My dad still got up every morning and kept going. Year after year.
As a kid, I remember thinking there was no way I would ever marry a farmer. The thought of having your future determined by things completely outside your control made absolutely no sense to me.
Looking back, that was probably unfair. Farmers are some of the hardest-working, most resilient people you'll ever meet. I would also argue Iowans are the salt of the earth.
What I didn't understand then was that every business owner is dealing with disasters. They just look different.
It doesn’t always have to be weather. It could be losing your biggest customer, employee turnover, supply chain disruptions, cash flow challenge, cyber event or equipment failures to name a few. There's always something lurking around the corner.
The lesson I learned from my childhood wasn't to panic; it was to control what you can control.
You can't stop a tornado, but you can make sure the barn is insured.
You can't stop every cyberattack, but you can make sure your equipment is updated and not vulnerable.
You can't prevent every outage, but you can have a plan for when one happens.
That's how I look at manufacturing environments today.
When I walk through a plant, I'm looking for exposures. I'm looking at how information flows through the organization. I'm looking at what happens if something fails and the information stops. What happens if someone clicks the wrong link? What happens if that twenty-year-old machine that everyone depends on suddenly stops communicating?
Most of the time, the risks are completely fixable.
What's scary is that many companies don't even know they're there.
Our job isn't to create fear. Our job is to identify the exposures, explain them, and help clients build a plan before something goes wrong.
The best clients listen, ask questions, and make improvements. They understand that business continuity isn't about being paranoid. It's about being prepared.
The clients who struggle are the ones who convince themselves it will never happen to them. Ugh, and it bites them every time. What we have realized over the past couple of years is that those clients are not a fit for us.
That's emergency work, and not the type of partnership we're looking for. We want to work with leaders who want to get ahead of problems, not simply react to them.
In business, there is always something lurking around the corner. The goal isn't to live in fear; it is to be ready when it shows up.
If you'd like a second set of eyes on your operation and understand where your exposures might be before they become problems, send me a message. I'd be happy to help.
When it comes to business continuity, the best time to fix a problem is before it becomes one.