The rains are here! Is your business ready for them? Having a plan for the typhoon isn’t solely about being ready for a disaster—it’s also about being ready to capture opportunities. Here are a few ideas on how to be ready for the rains.

10 Tips on How to Prepare Your Business for the Typhoon Season

Facilities and Asset Management

1) Create a plan where to bring your goods in case of flooding. If you anticipate flooding, you should move your goods to a safe location in advance or take steps to ensure that the goods would not be damaged by floods.

2) Review your insurance coverage. Ahead of the typhoon season, you should know if your facilities (shops, warehouses, etc.) have insurance that covers flood damage.

If your business relies on your fleets, you should have comprehensive car insurance that has Act of God coverage to protect it. Ondoy was a big wake-up call for businesses in Metro Manila and up until now, you could hear about cars that were “na-Ondoy” or were flooded during that storm.

3) Have back-up suppliers ready. This comes in handy should your regular supplier be unable to supply your business with the things you need to keep operation on going during and after a storm.

4) Businesses aren’t just about the things you sell, it’s also about your resources that keep your business moving. Cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox are free to use and can help you store important information off site so you don’t have to worry too much about losing your files if your computers become damaged during the storm.

HR Policies

5) Review your HR policies on how you can balance the needs of your business and the safety of your employees. Have a meeting with your employees to make sure they understand what they need to do should they find it difficult to go to work due to a typhoon.

Do you have policies in place to reward employees who have to work extra shifts to cover for other employees who didn’t make it to the office?

6) Have a plan in place for what to do when employees CAN’T go home. Are employees allowed to stay overnight at the office? Do you have facilities in place to support employees who are stuck in the office?

7) Do you have a system in place to update your employees on whether they need to go to work when the weather gets too bad before work starts? Cascading this information is best done through team supervisors.

8) Do you have a plan in place for assisting employees who have been victims of the storm? Organizing a donation drive with the help of other employees is one way to help.

Another way to help employees is to assist them process their disaster benefits under the SSS program.

Sales and Marketing

9) Some businesses get a sales boost ahead or after a typhoon. Hardware stores may see a boost in businesses as people try to prop up their houses before a storm or repair their homes after a storm. Make sure you are well stocked to accommodate brisk demand due to a storm.

10) Some, on the contrary, are not so lucky when the rainy season comes in because they see a drop in sales during this time. Have a brainstorming session with your team on how to keep sales up during the season. Sale promos and focusing your marketing efforts on products that people need now that the weather is getting colder can work.

The Philippines is prone to disasters, and in fact, our country is slammed by typhoons for an average of 20 times a year. PAGASA is even warning that this year’s storms will be stronger because of El Nino phenomenon, so preparing as much as you can for disasters helps.

We’ve seen increasingly destructive storms hit the country, and it’s entirely possible to see another storm as powerful and as destructive as Typhoon Yolanda, which hit in 2013.

So, how else are you preparing for the typhoon season? How are you preparing for the challenges that come with the season? Let us know in the comments!