Is your store prepared for disaster?

Other than being up to the normal codes that you have to have to be in business, not even remotely. My mind doesn't think that way. To be in this business, you have to have a really positive attitude. Financially, I think we'd be fine. We're very cautious about insurance and all that stuff. But as far as reinforcing doors and having water bottles stored up, absolutely not. We're lucky in that our store is kind of a fortress. It is made with cement block so there's not much can do it harm. We added a lot of aesthetics like a pretty fence, which would be harmed, but not the foundation. It's on high ground, and we're more likely to get hurricanes and high winds than flooding. I've had to close the store for two weeks for an ice storm, or a week for Hurricane Fran. I'm very fortunate that my husband does computer technology for a living, so I always assume that he has data backup and so forth covered. Most of our data is on our home computer anyway.

A lot of prayers. Seriously, I've got good insurance. We have flood insurance plus I have casualty insurance, break-in, glass breakage, all of that. I do have business interruption insurance, but I tried to use it during the hurricane and they would not pay the claim. It was a shock. You always think you're prepared. You think you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, and you find out different sometimes. We have just gone to a POS system and we pay monthly for backup in two different locations.

We burned to the ground in '77. No one was hurt, it was 40 minutes after we had closed. We actually opened in the back of another store during the holiday season. You just need to be creative and come up with ways. Our landlord does not have sprinklers, and it is a shared roof, so that scares the heck out of me.

We took out additional life insurance to cover the building loans. We still need to work on contingency plans and a will. We do back up our data daily. Last year, we had an electrical short which blew my computer up. I hadn't backed up the day before, and it made me realize that I have to back up every day. Our accounting system is on a little key that is always with me. In two seconds you can back up, put it in your pocket and be on your way. The building is well covered for damage. We just upgraded that to cover what it would cost to build the building today. But [we have] no flood insurance, because we're not in a flood plain, and no business interruption insurance. We have a security alarm hooked into police and fire departments. My insurance company told me that a lot of policies won't protect you if you don't have monitored security. And we have all of the standard exit lights and backup lighting because our building is so new. We have backup systems in the event that there's glass breakage; other business owners in town would take care of us in our absence. But we're subject to that "oh it'll never happen to me" syndrome, which is unfortunate, since we're expecting tornadoes.