By Judy Hector

It’s tough to think about the many things that could destroy everything you’ve worked for. Besides being a gloomy topic, thinking about losing a key client, discovering that a trusted employee really isn’t trustworthy, or even imaging your office getting flattened by a mudslide is the inverse of the way you naturally think. After all, working in the advertising industry, you’re tuned into finding—and focusing on—the positive and the possible instead of pessimistic gloom-and-doom scenarios.

Reality is, horrible things can and do happen. And a lot of the time there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
But what you can do, is develop a plan to mitigate the impact—and in some cases take preventative action—to protect your agency.

The first step is to figure out what threats are real, and how real they are. For example, if your shop is in San Francisco, you should be concerned about earthquakes but probably don’t have to worry about tornados.

On the other hand, a Tulsa agency should flip that and plan for a tornado while keeping earthquake danger low on the list.
Other threats might be heavy snowfall, fire, theft, embezzlement, or losing a big client or key employee. Disengage your optimism and the myriad of potential disasters will be apparent.

You can’t control Mother Nature

Even if your shop doesn’t straddle a fault line or hunker down in Tornado Alley, you should still consider natural disaster.
The King Agency in Richmond, VA learned how fast things can change when a flood destroyed their office. “There was a foot of water on the floor when we left at 6:00 pm,” says Dave King, the shop’s president. “I have a clock on my wall, about six-and-a-half feet up, that was stopped at 6:25.” With water rising faster than 13 feet per hour, there was little they could do. The next day, Dave was left with a bunch of month-old Macintosh doorstops and an 11-foot watermark on the wall. “Everything was ruined,” he said.

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