Flirting with Disaster: Continuity Planning for Your Business

Among the lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis is the importance of being prepared for the unexpected.

Among the lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis is the critical importance of being prepared for disruptions to your business. Equipment finance companies with business continuity plans in place were likely thinking more along the lines of short-term weather-related closings, hurricanes, floods, power outages and even earthquakes long before they considered a global pandemic. Regardless of the reason for the disruption, how should you approach operational continuity in your organization?

“Business continuity is all about having a thoughtful response plan in place in advance of an event. Playbooks help teams respond so to ensure that critical activities in support of our customers and partners can continue,” says Andrew Blacklock, Senior Director, Strategy and Business Operations, Cisco Systems Capital Corporation in San Jose, California. “We recognize that there’s never going to be a perfect blueprint based on our business continuity plan. However, this provides the tools to help us react quickly to whatever that circumstance might be.”

The experience of GreatAmerica Financial Services in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, supports the idea that while you may not be able to foresee every possible contingency, it is wise to have a plan in place. “We were not fully prepared to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, but we did have some advanced planning in place that dampened its impact on our customers, employees and systems,” says Jay Allpress, CISSP, Vice President, Information Security at GreatAmerica. “We owe a lot of our preparedness to being displaced in 2008 by a 500-year flood at our headquarters. Today, we are wiser from that experience and know how to better communicate and reinforce cultural standards that support resilience.”

Hurricane Katrina was the proving ground for the value of business continuity planning for Chris Bucher, President, Hancock Whitney Equipment Finance, LLC, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Being based in in the Crescent City, it is an annual rite to review and revise the business continuity plan. He says, “Due to planning, during Katrina we were prepared for thinking on our feet; we had an incredibly phased-in disaster plan.” Reviewing continuity plans in later years with associates who hadn’t been through Katrina, Bucher says they would laugh and say, “We have to do this again?” He continues, “That was my opinion until I had to go through the disaster. Just the fact that we went through the thought process got us through Katrina as well as major storms and floods affecting the region in more recent years. We’re seeing the same thing now with the pandemic.”

Getting Started

“Developing a business continuity plan can be as simple or complex as the resources an organization is able to commit. At the heart of what we’re talking about is just a candid review of how you enable your business so that if the unexpected occurs (i.e., power loss, system disruption, office closure, etc.) a thoughtful plan is in place,” says Blacklock.

In reviewing your business, look at each of your activities to determine if it is business critical and requires the ability to continue that activity within hours or days, or if it can wait longer in order to prioritize where your operational focus should be during a disruption. “You don’t want to spend time and resources implementing a plan to restore a business process right away that can and should wait a couple weeks to bring back online,” says Allpress.

“Given my experience during Hurricane Katrina and other major storms and floods affecting the region, every one of the associates on my team uses a laptop instead of a desktop. My laptop goes home with me every night, period.”

—Chris Bucher, Hancock Whitney Equipment Finance, LLC

 
For example, at UniFi Equipment Finance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, their small and medium-size business customers are a business-critical priority. At the onset of the pandemic, RJ Grimshaw, President and CEO, immediately gathered his team, got out the disaster recovery plan and began going through the different scenarios relative to how they were going to affect not so much UniFi’s business as its customers’ businesses. “We started working on scripts and a process for relief so our team was consistent across the business in talking to our customer base. We ensured our technology was set up where every phone call was picked up so there was no rolling into voice mail because we didn’t want any UniFi customer feeling that they were isolated or on an island.”

Going Remote

Enabling employees to work remotely and securely is a key element of business continuity. Blacklock says that for Cisco, as well as many other companies, in addition to their continuity planning, their ability to operate during the COVID pandemic was due to the early adoption of remote working and a journey to digitization. “Our efforts allowed us to respond to this situation very quickly by being able to seamlessly transition,” he says.

Communication is critical for remote working and should be considered from both a customer and an employee perspective. Fundamentally the point of continuity planning is maintaining business flow. Equipment finance companies have transactions to process, credit approvals to make and deals to fund. During the pandemic shutdown, Bucher says, “From a client standpoint, like most of our industry we can’t meet face to face, but we use telecom to keep in touch with them.”

Communication is important not only for workflow but also to reduce employee stress. During the pandemic, GreatAmerica activated an emergency website for its employees and sent regular voice and text messages out to their phones updating them on where they were with business functionality and news items that instilled a sense of normalcy. “When you’re displaced or disrupted by a disaster, it can be extremely stressful,” Allpress says. “Our communications right out of the gate were designed to minimize anxiety and reassure our people of their job security. Worrying about the future can be distracting and have a direct impact on performance.”

The transition to successful remote working would also not be possible without advances in and wide access to technology. Grimshaw has worked under enacted business continuity plans during Katrina, as well as other weather-related events. He says, “When I first arrived at UniFi, no one in the organization had laptops, but having been in Houston during Katrina we’ve structured our plan and capex budget where we’re buying laptops versus workstations primarily for this reason.”

“Business continuity is all about having a thoughtful response plan in place in advance of an event.”

—Andrew Blacklock, Cisco Systems Capital Corporation



Going remote during the pandemic has advanced the adoption of e-signatures and e-leases since businesses did not have access to their offices to have physical documents printed and signed for a period of time. Over the last year and a half UniFi has been heavily promoting e-signatures to its dealers and vendors, and Grimshaw says, “The pandemic is expediting that with some of our dealers who were hesitant to transition.”

An additional challenge of working remotely that should not be overlooked is designated workspace. Companies need to ask if employees have a designated workspace if they have to work from home. Budgeting for remote equipment may also be required. For example, Grimshaw notes, “A couple of our team members took it upon themselves to go out and buy computer monitors so they could work efficiently at home.”    

Testing 1, 2, 3

Regardless of the breadth or complexity of your continuity plan, unless you test it is difficult to detect and truly understand where gaps or weaknesses exist.

“We owe a lot of our preparedness to being displaced in 2008 by a 500-year flood at our headquarters.”

—Jay Allpress, GreatAmerica Financial Services



“We bring a team together annually, creating a mock event to test the systems and processes in place,” says Blacklock. “Using our business continuity plan, we practice scenarios in order to improve so we are best able to respond appropriately if an event occurs.”

For a smaller community bank like UniFi whose employees are largely office-centric, going remote meant testing the bandwidth of its VPN system. Grimshaw says, “In early March 2020 all of us logged in at the same time to see if we could crash the system. We had some issues, like everyone, but it worked well.” Nevertheless, UniFi built a private Facebook page where everyone could communicate to our team members as a backup.

Doing a plan refresh to look at how your business changed from year to year relative to the previous year can also be a part of this process. Changes in the number of employees might drive equipment expenditures, locations needed in disaster sites and other requirements. Updating cell phone numbers, your call tree and other communication links should not be overlooked.

“In early March 2020 all of us logged in at the same time to see if we could crash the system. We had some issues, like everyone, but it worked well.”

—RJ Grimshaw, UniFi Equipment Finance



There are always going to be disruptions to your business. Identifying the critical activities that are necessary for the day-to-day operations of your business, putting a plan in place so that you can continue those activities in the event something happens and testing that plan on a regular basis are steps that every equipment finance company can take. More importantly, these are steps you can’t afford not to take to ensure your business continuity.