Avoiding Disaster: Both Natural and Unnatural

[00:00:07.760] - Dan

Hey.

[00:00:08.760] - Dan

Welcome to Books and the biz. Rich, what do you think of a new intro for those watching a video? I love it. That's great. That makes us look so professional at this point. It's almost like we know what we're doing, but our listeners probably know better by now. Well, welcome again to Books in the biz. I am here with my good friend Rich Valtrey. Rich, how are you doing?

[00:00:31.170] - Rich

I'm doing well.

[00:00:32.090] - Dan

Life is good in New York. No natural disasters to worry about at this point, right?

[00:00:39.850] - Rich

No, not as of now. Right now it's pretty calm. Weather is a little weird, but hey, it is what it is. Everybody's saying the same thing all over the place.

[00:00:48.470] - Dan

Yes, it is. It's been pretty warm here too. Our discussion today really centers around some of the things that we've been seeing in the news, as a lot of our discussions do. But what prompted this was actually all the stuff that seemed to be happening out west of us right now. At the time we started thinking about this, we had... There was a hurricane that was going through California. Of course, there was the wildfires in New York City. You and I have been dealing with residue from wildfires through Canada, all that coming down to New York in the Midwest, which is creating all sorts of haze, really doesn't necessarily affect our business that much. But the point is, things happen. Things happen that are beyond our control. Things can cause our business to really shut down for the most part. And I'll give you an example here. Let me pull up. Here's all the stuff I found a couple of articles. This is a good one. Six ways natural disasters can affect your business. And of course, I agree with all of them. Supply chain disruptions, we had that during certain pandemic times. Of course, we've seen a number of issues pop up related to supply chains.

[00:02:14.600] - Dan

Communication can happen, and we'll touch base on that. Damaged buildings, obviously, if you're going through a hurricane, earthquake, wildfire, tornado, any one of those things could affect your property and the operation. There is also the potential for loss of equipment, failure of equipment, loss of personnel. We'll touch base on that because I think that's the one that a lot of companies don't really think about, especially a lot of business owners. We still have that feeling that we're invincible and that we'll live forever. Unfortunately, if we're not prepared, that can create all sorts of other problems. Then, of course, loss of clientele, because if you can't provide your product or service, then that's another problem. Rich, you had brought up a good point just before we were getting on this. Why don't you talk a little bit about what most people think they need to focus on when it comes to natural disasters?

[00:03:12.270] - Rich

Well, I think that what immediately resonated to me or what really grew in my mind really quickly when we talked about the topic was the fact that the media has been really, really focused over the last 20 years on the movement of all of your data and data orders. Anything that was digital or able to be digitized was put in the cloud. The data security and the communications part of it rose to the top. Every time you think business loss or natural disaster, you're immediately thinking, Well, where's my data and where's my computers? We've gone this route that everything is based on IT. But I think as we were talking about, I think the big thing here is there's a whole set of other items. The article you're showing has six of them, and only one of them was communication.

[00:04:15.050] - Dan

So-.

[00:04:16.090] - Dan

And.

[00:04:17.080] - Dan

That's probably the biggest one because when you have a disaster, what's the first thing you have to do? Communicate.

[00:04:25.150] - Rich

Well, totally agree. But I think that the issues that come up, though, are the fact that has everybody thought about the other pieces?

[00:04:36.690] - Dan

Right. Well, before we jump on the other pieces, I actually have a good story to go with the push to the cloud. So you think you're going to put all your information in the cloud is going to be safe. Well, I had a client recently and they have a business management software, cloud based. The data that is generated through the inputs in that software is all cloud based. And recently they did an update. And when that update happened, something else happened. And what ended up going on was they started realizing that it was throwing their accounts payables and accounts receivables off, and off by big numbers too. They couldn't figure out what was going on. Well, it appears, I can't say for sure they're still working on what's going on, but it appears that it was caused by the update to the cloud. So for months, they've had issues where they haven't been collecting enough, they haven't been sending out the bills correctly, and it's created a huge cash flow issue. And the other problem is the software, the cloud based software, has been saving all the data in the cloud. Well, what happens when you do that?

[00:05:46.420] - Dan

If all your automatic backups are in the cloud, well, it's backing up bad information on top of bad information. And now they are struggling to try and get things straightened out. It's create a huge cash flow issue. Of course, everyone's pointing the fingers at everybody else. There's no physical backup to go back and say, Well, here's where the break happened, or here's where after the update, we started seeing these differences in our billing and in our software. You really do have to be careful from the technology side too, on assuming that just because you put it up in the cloud, it is going to be safe and it's going to be accurate. I think one of the things you'll hear us both talk about today is contingencies. If you fly in an airplane, there are multiple contingencies to keep that plane in the air. If something fails, there's a backup and there's a backup of the backup. In some cases in business, you need to do that.

[00:06:40.970] - Rich

I totally agree with that. What we do find a lot is that companies don't think about what's the backup to the backup to the backup. You're lucky if the company is thinking about one backup. Exactly. There's a lot that goes into planning for that because you don't want to do after the fact. This goes back to our conversations where we talk about reaction versus proaction. This really has to be the thing that people talk about in the proactive side, not in the, Oh, by the way, there's a hurricane coming or a tornado just hit, and let's think about this now. It's a little late because that thing is going to come down on you faster than you can actually fix things. Because you can call people and say, Hey, come on in and help me fix this. But if they're dealing with the same tornado or hurricane or natural disaster that's coming, you're not going to get that phone call and get somebody in a matter of minutes.

[00:07:41.010] - Dan

Why do companies push this off? Why do you think they do that? That's been my biggest question.

[00:07:47.950] - Rich

I think we all have at least a little bit of a propensity to just say, it's not going to happen to us, not me, not in my backyard, hard, This isn't what's going to happen. I'm protected, even though you might not be. You just are telling yourself that you are, that this isn't going to happen. But I think that the reality is you don't know that answer. You're guessing and hoping, and hope is not a strategy.

[00:08:18.720] - Dan

Exactly. And I believe there's the always tomorrow principle that seems to be part of human nature. So I don't have time to do it today. And this is going to be, I haven't told you yet, but this is going to be a subject for a future podcast. I always have time tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. So today I'm too busy. I'll deal with it tomorrow. Tomorrow just keeps getting pushed ahead until something happens. And then, as you point out, it's too late. You're not prepared. And then the situation might be that you just don't have the resources anymore.

[00:08:54.460] - Rich

Yeah, I think that it's becoming a little bit more of an issue I think people should really be thinking about because not just from the natural disaster thing, but the world is moving that much faster, you can miss something. So you really do want to make sure that everything is as buttoned up as you can possibly make it within balance. I'm not expecting someone to go build Fort Knox around their business to... That doesn't quite make sense. You can't spend that money or that time to build up on the assumption that you might have something happen. But you should at least have a plan for how do you deal with it if something does. And even if it's in the general sense of, how do I build something that basically says if something happens and the something is not really defined because you don't know what it'll be, but what happens if? And I think you have plenty of great examples, even that one article, that what happens if one of these happens.

[00:09:57.020] - Dan

So where do you weigh the expenses on this? Because that's probably the other reason why a business owner might not do it, is they'll just say, well, it's just too damn expensive. And then the risk versus reward of it, again, it's like insurance. You pay for insurance with the the hope that you never have to use it. But the whole idea you're paying for that insurance is because if you did, hopefully it's not going to be a catastrophic result afterwards. You've got some coverage on it. From a financial perspective, where you draw the line?

[00:10:31.330] - Rich

Well, I think there's a couple of things to go into that. I think the first thing is what business are you in? That way you can figure out, What am I looking to cover? Pandemic hit. And depending on the type of business that you were in, the expense to deal with that contingency varied. For me, we were already pretty much remote, that most of my people were remote. We had space to meet when we wanted to meet, but for the most part, people were already remote. The tools were in place to work from remote, but we're a service business. We don't have a ton of equipment. We needed to make sure that internet was qualified, that it was fast enough, that there was broadband, that you could get to the systems that were already in the cloud. That's one. But if you were in, one of my clients was in oil and gas support, where they're actually providing things to the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

[00:11:34.270] - Rich

So.

[00:11:35.000] - Rich

What did they have to do? They weren't sitting there saying, Well, my computer works. We're all good.

[00:11:40.500] - Rich

They.

[00:11:40.960] - Rich

Were sending people out to oil rigs and there's a transportation issue. How do you get people out there? There's a daily boat or there's an emergency helicopter? Other than that, what happens if you took someone who had COVID and you sent them to an oil rig?

[00:11:56.990] - Dan

Everyone else gets COVID too.

[00:11:59.930] - Rich

Everybody else gets COVID-2, and now possibly your oil rig gets shut down. Then what do you deal with? Each business has to evaluate their own set of issues or set of their contingency plan and what would the cost be. In the oil and gas support company, the big thing was testing all those people before they went out to the boat. And then it became a security issue and it became a quarantining issue. They had to deal with how do you keep the people that come in and then they qualify that they are sick. You have to figure out where are you going to put them. You have to either quarantine them or are you sending them home? There was a whole series of what do you have to come up with as far as your backup plan.

[00:12:47.440] - Dan

There are significant costs to that too. Absolutely. I think in this particular situation, a lot of those costs got passed through. I think that's where we saw a lot of costs are going early on either from the supply chain issues or from situations where now more processes had to be put in place, people couldn't work. Then you're relying on fewer people to do more, and of course, you're paying them a premium to do that work. There's all these cost rollovers that tend to happen in a situation like this. The thing I struggle with is, we're talking about contingencies here, and we'll get into the communications side of it a little bit. But since we're still on the financial side, all businesses should have some contingency plan financially as well. Just because you bring a dollar in doesn't mean that dollar goes out or that dollar goes in your pocket. I think you've got to really try and figure out how much money you need to set aside that's reasonable that you have at the ready should something happen.

[00:13:54.820] - Rich

I think the other thing too is we're mentioning insurance, right? And insurance, they tend to be somewhat, well, pretty much reactive anyway. But you don't know the timing. I had one client was dealing with a business loss that came from hurricane coming through and it flooded the area around their building and they had a business loss insurance policy. So they went to claim that. It was years going through and applying for that business loss. Now you had to prove you had a business loss. You had to have all data in place. You had to be able to prove to them that this is what we actually lost because of the hurricane. I think that's the other thing, too. How do you say it's because of the hurricane? You wind up in an argument with the people who are supposed to cover you, you wind up dealing with someone who's saying, We think that's skeptical. We don't want to pay that.

[00:14:49.900] - Dan

That's actually a great example that you brought up because going back to my first example when we started this podcast about these whole software situation, that's exactly what they're going through right now. They report it to the insurance company and the insurance company saying, Well, how can you prove that it's the software that caused the loss? Maybe you just made a mistake. Now they've got to go through all this process. They have to hire people, forensic IT people to go in and look at and see what happened to tell them if the software was the culprit or not. And then they have to use that to support the insurance claim. Those people aren't cheap. They're probably spending tens of thousands to have somebody root through data to try and figure out what's going on there. So just because you have insurance doesn't mean that you're always going to be covered or covered immediately, which again, goes back to what I was talking about, which is you need to have a rainy day fund, if you will, to protect you. You need ready reserves available so that if something happens, you're covered.

[00:15:53.150] - Rich

Well, I'll give you another just to, because we already said, it's not always a natural disaster that you have to deal with. It could just be a flat out mistake. And I've got two of those that basically one of them, I had a client that COVID hit, procedures were changed to deal with a lot of people being remote and someone hacked their email system, not even into their actual system. They hacked into the email and were able to track when people were sending emails that related to a certain, say, number. So they were watching one of the financial people in their email to see when they were saying, Oh, I have this $1.4 million wire I have to send out. So immediately, some hacker from somewhere sends them an email and said, We've changed our banking information, so please send the bankBank. Please send that wire that's coming to our new bank at this set of instructions.

[00:16:55.230] - Dan

And so- And that's an easy mistake.

[00:16:57.160] - Rich

So the one guy looks over to the other guy and says, Does this look real? He says, Yes. So they turn around and they wire the money to the new banking information. And turns out that because they were in that RSS feed or whatever the technical jargon is, they actually were able to get through to these guys that this looks good. Now, as we look at it in hindsight, we say if they were in the office, the one guy could have actually turned around and showed another guy on the floor face to face. Do you think this looks legit? But they're doing it by email.

[00:17:32.760] - Rich

And.

[00:17:33.800] - Rich

The guy that's actually hacking them is watching all the emails. So he's involved in making sure that this goes through. So they sent out a million four and a month later, the construction company that was supposed to get the 1.4 million turns around and says, Where's our money? And that's the only indication that something happened, that it went to the wrong place. So cyber insurance, everybody went to cyber insurance. Cyber insurance gave them $100,000 out of a million four. And big investigation starts, FBI, everybody else, they found 400 of it. So they wound up with $500,000 recovery. But it was a million four that went out the door.

[00:18:18.470] - Dan

Still 900,000.

[00:18:19.960] - Rich

So how do you deal with that? What's your contingency plan for that? If these guys were a pretty big outfit, so they were able to sweat it off, shrug it off, whatever term you want to call it, smaller companies are not going to be able to do that.

[00:18:36.850] - Dan

I know some pretty good size companies that if you lose a million dollars, it's a pretty big... That's going to affect a lot of things.

[00:18:45.070] - Rich

It hurts. So that was one. Then just to throw another story out there, when I'm talking about it being a mistake, there was a client that was buying product from China that they thought they could do better by shipping their product from the Dominican Republic. Now, everything in China was set. Yes, the prices were a couple of bucks higher per unit, but they figured it's going to cost us a couple of bucks less than that if we just go over to the Dominican Republic. Problem was they shuttered China before Dominican Republic was tested. So Dominican Republic was shipping these products that were defective and they had to keep sending them back. So the supply chain we're talking about, what happens when your supply chain goes out the window? That was a huge deal. We had a $20 million company that was headed for zero. Because they couldn't sell any product. Their whole business model was we have product in the warehouse. Well, they couldn't replenish the warehouse. So what do you do in that case? There's no insurance for that, maybe business loss. But we're talking about business loss. What happens when you have to prove it?

[00:20:02.700] - Rich

Well, it's your fault. You made the choice. You did something that caused that issue. You changed your supplier and you changed not having a backup supplier. Took them four years to rebuild that.

[00:20:16.770] - Dan

Wow.

[00:20:17.820] - Rich

So how do you weather that four years?

[00:20:22.280] - Dan

That's difficult. I think that happens more often than not. I have a similar story. So there was a time when I had an office over in China and we were helping a company here try and source some materials from over there. And because it was a new account, if anyone's done business with China, they want their money upfront for everything. So the company wired the money to this company in China. Now, wire transfers are handled differently in different countries. So for example, if it was Dan Paulson Limited here, and I spelled out limited fully, not the LTD, but I abbreviated it in the wire transfer here, more than likely would go through. In China, that's not the case. So it was a situation where the company had the limited tag on it and they had it spelled out in full, but the company that sent the wire transfer abbreviated it. Well, it came to dead stop and we didn't know that. So they're looking for their product, which was on a time constraint. So they're stuck and the money is gone. The money has been sent out. And we're telling them, well, that money should come back or it should go somewhere.

[00:21:38.310] - Dan

And they kept pressing and pressing, well, we really need this. We really need this. Okay, well, then you could send the money through a different way. And they did that. And guess what happened? About the same time, both payments hit the company's account and of course, they couldn't get all the money back. So they paid double for something.

[00:21:59.080] - Dan

And.

[00:22:01.730] - Dan

That's unfortunately, it wasn't a huge sum of money, but it was big enough. And these are the things that happen. And the other part we haven't even touched on yet, and we'll get to that in a minute, is the personnel side of things. But I'm just curious from you, Rich. So looking at from the financial side, what does a company do to set as, is there a certain percentage of money they should have set aside as contingency? When you're a CFO, do you look at something like that? How do you figure out what you need to do to have in ready reserves in case something happens?

[00:22:33.610] - Rich

Yeah, I think, again, it depends on what company are we talking about. With our examples all being, we're buying product or not so much the accidental shipping of having somebody break into our email. But if you're buying product and you're wiring money around for that, I mean, there's a piece there like how do you keep enough reserve to cover? And depending on the size of the company or the actual model of the company, I think you have to put something away. But I don't really have a guideline of how much. I think every company, regardless, should have some degree of a slush fund or a backup fund, an emergency fund. Maybe it's 10 %, maybe it's five %, maybe it accumulates and you get to the point where you're like, we're okay there. So let's not keep putting earnings away. But somewhere along the line you should have something. Bigger companies that I've worked on generally put some reserve on the books. Regardless, a lot of times it doesn't translate to a tax deduction, but it puts it on a balance sheet where there's a liability or for a potential liability. And the place I saw it was a lot of developers, etc, that have the potential for running into an environmental liability.

[00:24:01.380] - Rich

You're building a building and all of a sudden you hit, Oh, by the way, we didn't let you know this used to be a brownfield, or there's something there that just puts you at a halt. What do you do? You have to have the ability to either clean that up or spend the time to go after whoever is going to help you actually get past that issue. You tend to see people try to put something like that on the books. I worked for a pharma company. I think it was pharma. Call it Pharma. It was definitely chemical related. They were worried about environmental liability for anything that happened on their plant because it was a big enough company that you had people watching you for everything and you spilled one bottle of something on a concrete floor and everybody was worried about, what are you going to do about that? They put something on the books to say potentially we could have some issues, even if they're just legal, even if they're responding to a claim. So you wind up with those expenses and you have to build them into your books so you're able to really understand what am I spending or what am I subject to?

[00:25:15.200] - Dan

Exactly. And I guess for me personally, when I look at what they recommend for an individual, they recommend usually about having six months cash on hand in case something were to happen. Most people don't do that. I also think that's unrealistic for most businesses to do. But I would say that depending upon what business you have, it is not unreasonable to have at least two months, if not three, set aside just for general operations, paying employees, keeping lights on, things like that, that you might need to have ready to go in case something were to happen. Because back to your insurance example, in most cases, you're going to be battling with the insurance to some degree to prove you have a loss. Well, hopefully that can be accomplished within less than three months. But at the very least, if you have three months going, by then you have enough back online that you should start making money again. That is something that I would consider 2-3 months worth of general operations funding set aside. I realized that most companies can't just write a check and put that in a separate account right away. But that is something that I think most businesses should really look at is taking a small chunk of their profits each month and just swirling that away into a fund like you talked about.

[00:26:37.610] - Dan

That becomes a potential liability on your balance sheet that you're protecting against. I think that's going to be really important. We've talked about a lot of different things, but we really need to touch on communication because as you pointed out, there's this list of six here, and only one of them deals with the communication side of things. From a financial side, I know you have to keep in line with communicating to the owners. And the owners, of course, have to keep their communication flowing to the employees to cover whatever happens and be prepared. For me, the biggest contingency factor that you need to deal with on communication side is being prepared for when the unprepared happens. And most companies I know don't have a playbook. They don't have something to go to that says if X happens, here's what you say to the media, here's what you say to the community, here's what you say to the employees. And then here's steps one through 10 that you need to deal with. And it's a lot easier to create that when the world's not on fire and you're not dealing with the crisis at hand. But everyone should have some crisis management policy.

[00:27:56.900] - Rich

I totally agree with that. And I think that interestingly enough, I think on the communications side, I think from the data security side, most people have figured out how to make sure that they're somehow protected and can move through. Covid was probably the ultimate documenter of all this for people. For me, like I said before, I was already pretty much remote. So we already had Zoom. So the darling of the COVID era, I already had it. So we already had Zoom for meetings. We already had everything in the cloud, whether it was Dropbox or systems that we had been using just for our working files and backups, everything was already there. So a matter of, oh, I got to move over here and re-plug in my computer and then I was back up and running. The other thing was it became, well, what happens if your power goes out? Well, then we put in a generator. And then the other thing is after that, if the cable goes out and your network goes down so you don't have the WiFi and the ability to get to the Internet, then I had a backup, which was my cell phone.

[00:29:08.220] - Rich

So as long as my cell phone was on an unlimited plan, I could hook up to that. And there I was off and running again. So again, very simplistic on my side because my business was pretty straightforward. I think the bigger companies have to go through and do the same thing from the data side. But your point about having a checklist to be able to go through and say if something happens and again, something might be undefined. It could be in quotes, it could be something happens.

[00:29:37.400] - Dan

Well, I'll share example with you of something that I know happened. This has probably been a couple of decades ago now, but a prominent business person in Wisconsin is coming back from a fishing trip in Canada. Their plane crashes. And on the plane is the owner, I believe the CFO or at least the person that was doing the finances and their top operations person. Dead, killed in the plane crash. That business didn't even last two weeks after that happened because all your prominent people were all killed in the same disaster. And on top of that, there was no communication on who's going to handle the finances, what's going to be in place for that, who's going to communicate to the media from the family side of things. I don't think they had all the ducks in a row as far as that goes. So does the wife take over the business, or is there another business partner that steps in? Basically, the end result was, from my understanding, the business was liquidated. That put several hundred employees out of a job, and it created all sorts of havoc. Those are the things that I don't think most owners really reckon with is you could be at a trade show in Vegas and when you come back, something happens or you have a heart attack.

[00:31:02.720] - Dan

It's probably the most more realistic thing is you have a health emergency that either disables you or kills you, and you've got nothing in place to cover what you do. You and I both know, because we work with enough business owners that tend to be a little bit on the control freak side. I think that's just the nature of what you are when you start a company, when you build an enterprise is you have your hands in a lot of different things, but you haven't taught anyone else how to do those things. Now you're gone or you're at a point where you can't and there's no systems or process to manage the work to be done to keep the process to keep the machine going, if you will.

[00:31:46.200] - Rich

Yeah, I think, again, I have seen that where this isn't a... It's not a top of mind thought. Everybody everybody assumes they're going to be here forever and everybody assumes nothing's possibly going to happen to them. They're invincible. Not the way that it goes. You don't know when it'll happen, but somewhere along the line, something will happen and you'd like to be out ahead of it. But bigger companies tend to have, I guess, more of a thought on some of this stuff. I remember being with Price Waterhouse years ago and one of the policies was that no two partners could be on the same airplane at any time. And you think, Well, why would you think about that? Well, either something happened in their history because they're a 100-year-old company at that point, or they just are out ahead of it saying, This is what happens if two partners are on a plane and the plane doesn't make it. They're a little bit further out ahead of it. I think the smaller company has to start thinking a little bit more like the bigger company.

[00:32:59.980] - Dan

Yes, definitely. Here's another unnatural disaster, which is even different from the one I just described. It's very true in this day and age of cancel culture and whatnot. But let's say you have an employee that posts something on their Facebook or their Twitter or Snapchat or whatever it might be, and that offends the wrong group of people. Now you've got the picketers out in front of your business, or you've got other issues going on where people are trying to basically shut down your operation or get people to not do business with you. How are you prepared for that? It's not just those situations, but you talked about hackers. There's possibilities that hackers can get into your social accounts and post a bunch of untrue, controversial things that then create all sorts of other issues that you've got to deal with. How are you prepared for that? That's where a lot of companies really need to, again, look beyond just, again, the earthquakes and tornadoes and stuff, and look at what are all the other potential roadblocks business that can be created. As you pointed out, it doesn't have to be a priced waterhouse doing it.

[00:34:11.540] - Dan

It could be mom and pop coffee shop down the street. That's something like that is probably going to be the most debilitating to them because they're focused on a small group of people that are paying the bills there. But even the companies of 20, 40, 50 million, 100 million, this can be very impactful. Again, you like the insurance company, you have to prove your case to win back the good graces sometimes, or you have to figure out how to handle those situations in a way that's going to create a positive result. If you don't have a plan for that, the most common issue that people bring up is no comment. Well, what happens when you hear somebody say no comment, Rich? That automatically to me implies guilt. So you really got to figure out a better answer than no comment when the wrong thing is said or the wrong thing is done and you need to recover from that, especially in today's climate when it comes to social media and everything else.

[00:35:13.000] - Rich

Yeah. This is why I really do like the idea of everybody should have some degree of a what do we do if, just a little... It doesn't have to be a handbook. It just has to be a quick checklist even of if this happens, what do you do? Who do you call? Individuals have that, What do you do? If something happens to me, what should my kids do? Who should they call? Who's my advisor that if something happens to me, they know that I just have to call these people because that's who dad trusted. I think the company has to take the same mentality and say, What do we do if? Who do we call if?

[00:35:58.600] - Dan

I think that's the reason- Especially if it's media related. There should be a single point person that they call because a reporter is going to call anyone they can get a phone number for. And heaven forbid, is a front line employee that is unfamiliar with the situation or knows about the situation and then says the wrong thing. They should know to direct it to so and so who's in charge of PR or so and so who's the CFO or whatever it might be. They should be able to redirect that information. Very good point. Agreed.

[00:36:31.500] - Rich

There's.

[00:36:33.260] - Rich

A lot of stuff we covered here. We could probably keep going on and on about this, but I think my takeaway from what we're talking about here is you do need to be prepared. I don't care what size company you are. You do have to look at the contingencies. While you can't cover them all, you need to have something in place so that way people know what to do and where to go and how to fix. You also have to have finances set aside so that you can overcome the hurdles that are either natural or unnatural. What's your thoughts?

[00:37:05.270] - Rich

I think my takeaway is definitely prepare some degree of a checklist of a contingency outline of if something happens, this is what we do. The finance is definitely a piece that makes sure that you're shored up and there's no issues there. I think the other thing to add to it, though, is think outside the box a little bit for your own company. You know your company. No one knows your company better than you do. But think outside the box a little bit, meaning that think about what else might happen to your company, what else could attack your company, and how could you be prepared if it's something that wouldn't necessarily be normal. And that way, think about the thing that, I don't know, you have a factory that's in a valley and it could flood. I mean, there's things like that that maybe you're not thinking about today because it hasn't happened before, but it could. So that could be part of the what do I define as something. So again, think outside the box just a little bit for your company, because if you're comfortable, the thing that hits you is going to be the thing that you weren't.

[00:38:12.430] - Dan

Prepared for. Exactly. And if you need help with this, here we can do our shameless self-promotion, Rich. If you need help with any of this, I've got a finance guy that's sitting here across the screen from me who would be more than happy to help you. Rich, how do they get a hold of you?

[00:38:28.610] - Rich

My email is the best way to get me. It's rveltre@veltregroup. Com.

[00:38:33.640] - Dan

And you can get a hold of me at danpaulsonlet'sgo.com. And I can definitely help you with a lot of the operational stuff that you might need to figure out on how you cover for that. Put us together and we can really do quite a number on helping you figure out how to protect your business, should something happen in the future. So keep that in mind. If not, hopefully you've learned something from this podcast. You can now find us officially at booksnbiz.com, that is booksthe letter N, biz, B-I-Z. Com, and feel free to check out our other podcasts. Also, if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notifications button; we'd love to see you come back next week. And until then, Rich, it's been fun. We'll talk about something new when we get together next Thursday.

[00:39:23.370] - Rich

Sounds great.

[00:39:24.410] - Dan

All right. Thanks a lot.

[00:39:25.980] - Rich

All right. Take care.