One of the most important things about your business is the front door. Whether you’re a retail operation with customers walking in and out all day, or work primarily remote and online, your address gives people a mental image of your business. The building you work in also defines how you work; sociably, or locked away in a single room; where your stock is stored and how much room you have.
If something happens to endanger your premises, it can upset your entire business. Whether that’s a natural disaster like storms or flooding making the building unusable, or finding yourself unexpectedly turned out by your landlord, it can be one of the most serious challenges you face, and all the worse for happening suddenly. It’s important, therefore, to plan ahead and have contingencies in place in case the worse happens.
Storage
Do some preliminary research about local storage facilities. You won’t have any shortage of choice: if you’re looking for storage London alone has plenty of options in every borough and even small towns have at least one facility on the fringes.
Being ready to move your fittings, stock and supplies into storage means that if you find you have to leave your premises in a hurry, you don’t stand as much risk of losing items you’ve invested in. This reduces the overall loss, and helps you be ready to get back to work at full capacity when you find a new place to work.
Depending on what you do and the facilities on offer, you may be able to continue working to some extent while your business is in storage. If you have an order and delivery aspect to your business for example, you can continue to send out customer orders even while your stock is in private storage, which maintains a flow revenue in this difficult time.
Communication
The key to maintaining your customer base when this kind of disaster strikes is to keep up communication. If you’re able to, put up some signage around your normal premises explaining the problems you’ve run into and your plans to return.
If you have any kind of website or social media presence make sure you’re using it to communicate that you are down but not out. Try to not throw blame around for the situation, even if it appears very clear to you why you’ve lost your building. Maintaining a balanced dialogue with your loyal customers is the key to ensuring they’ll come flooding back through your doors when you can open up again.