Guests: Nora O’Brien, Daniel Ramsey
Recorded: March 16, 2020
Excerpt
As a preparedness & disaster recovery coach, Nora’s team supports their clients to prepare for, learn the skills to respond to, and recover from disaster through customized and effective emergency preparedness planning, training, and exercise services.
Creating a plan and having one in place is crucial to ensuring that you survive the challenging & turbulent market ahead. Be ready for unexpected challenges coming from unknown quarters as we deal with retail panics, stock market dips, staff illness, and other concerns.
Connect Consulting Services prepares organizations throughout the United States to be disaster resilient as they prepare, respond, and recover from an emergency. They are specialists in guiding our clients through an interactive planning process as they build EP program infrastructure, produce customized emergency operations and business continuity plans, and tailored training and exercise programs.
Transcript
00:00:05:18 – 00:00:30:03
Daniel Ramsey
Hey, everybody. Daniel Ramsey here with MyOutDesk. So today we have a different topic. Usually we’re coming in and bringing like business ideas and kind of some tweaks and just teaching how to grow a business. But today we’re actually talking about what would happen if disaster struck tomorrow. And so if you’re listening to this, this is like one of those things.
00:00:30:03 – 00:01:01:08
Daniel Ramsey
Are you ready? If there was a flood, if there was a fire and everything in your office completely just like got eliminated, like, what would you do? And the stats are kind of crazy in the in the sense that 40% of businesses who actually experience a disaster like fail 100%. And this is a blind spot. And when Nora, who’s on here, I’m going to introduce in a second, she’s talking to me and I’m thinking as a business owner, you know, we’ve got thousands of employees and I’m not prepared.
00:01:01:12 – 00:01:38:16
Daniel Ramsey
And I was like, oh, my God, we have to have her on our video to help our people get ready. And I mean the world the world is changing. We’re in California. There’s a huge fire that’s just ravaging through in 24 hours. In less than 24 hours, 6700 structures are gone. An entire town completely destroyed. And I can tell you right now, if you’re in business right now and you don’t have a disaster plan, and if you’re not working with someone like Nora, this is like the webinar Facebook Live thing for you.
00:01:38:16 – 00:01:59:08
Daniel Ramsey
I can tell you as a business owner, we never think about the what if something went wrong scenario. And so today we’ve got Nora here. What she’s like, she’s got like, you know, a lot of credentials. So I’m going to try to get them all right here. Six years in emergency management, nine years owning your own business. She has a master’s degree in this.
00:01:59:08 – 00:02:24:09
Daniel Ramsey
She has a certification. She was on she’s been on a ton of wildfires. That pandemic, Katrina, Sandy, she’s SBA business woman of the year in Sacramento so 2018 which is cool and most importantly she’s a my our desk client so we’ll hear a little bit about how she’s using her virtual professional and what she’s doing. But Nora, thank you for coming on today.
00:02:24:16 – 00:02:46:17
Nora O’Brien
Thank you for having me. This is just it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. And our goal is to not be the sky is falling. Oh, my God. What are we? What’s going to happen kind of person? But just to say, you have to assess what your risks are. And once you assess those risks, then then you can plan for those risks.
00:02:46:17 – 00:02:57:11
Nora O’Brien
And a lot of people don’t take the time to schedule and identify what those risks are. So knowing what your risks are and then plan for them is how you can be better prepared for disaster.
00:02:58:01 – 00:03:17:17
Daniel Ramsey
And what’s cool about Nora is we have she’s like the real deal. Like you were just volunteering over the weekend in the California fire that kind of destroyed an entire town. So like you walked in there and took charge and taught them how to do stuff. So we’re going to get into that and we’re going to have some stories.
00:03:17:17 – 00:03:39:08
Daniel Ramsey
But if you’re listening today, I want to be clear about what you’re going to get. First of all, we’re going to in this, we’re going to teach you to think differently about your business and protect for a major disaster. A good friend of mine had to evacuate East Coast. His wife died. You know, there was flooding. And he and I were talking and he’s like, I didn’t even I wasn’t prepared.
00:03:39:14 – 00:03:58:23
Daniel Ramsey
We had to stay in a hotel. I had a dog. It was I mean, just no planning. Right. And so if if you have if you have a business and you have employees and you have customers, which I’m guessing you’re going to have customers and you’re going to have employees. Right? Then this is the webinar for you. We’re going to teach you to think differently today with Nora.
00:03:59:20 – 00:04:17:19
Daniel Ramsey
Another benefit of that is and nor brought this up and I was like, Oh yeah, when you think about being prepared, your employees, it’s going to make a better culture for your employees because they’re going to think, Oh my gosh, the owner cares about me. And has a plan in case there’s a problem. So I think that’s really important.
00:04:17:19 – 00:04:41:07
Daniel Ramsey
So you’re going to get, you know, some cultural shifts in your business. And Nora, share with us how to do that. And the big thing is she’s going to give away her 12 point assessment so that you’re going to walk away from this and we’ll post the links here live. So you’re going to walk away with something to take a tool so you can implement after it and after this conversation.
00:04:41:07 – 00:04:53:10
Daniel Ramsey
And we’ll go through the how tos. But let’s jump. Let’s jump right in. You had a story about Hawaii, which I mean, you know, in my mind, Hawaii is like this beautiful island, green beauty. What happened in Hawaii?
00:04:53:19 – 00:05:15:22
Nora O’Brien
Well, what happened in Hawaii is that there was a hurricane this summer. And when there was a hurricane, what we’ve done is we we always look to history to say this is what the issues are. This is you know, this is what what could happen if we had this kind of this this flooding and how it might impact communities?
00:05:16:03 – 00:05:39:15
Nora O’Brien
Well, the historical modeling they looked at what the models what what kind of flooding you had related to hurricanes in the past. And they estimated 18 to 20 inches of rain, huge tons of all the rain. Obviously, what they actually got was 47 inches of rain. And the reason is, is climate change. You know, like we’re not I’m not going to get into debate to whether there is climate change or not.
00:05:39:15 – 00:06:04:22
Nora O’Brien
The point is sea tides are rising. We are you know, we’re this is it’s about climate change, change adaptation at this point so that you can’t look to. Well, this has never happened here. So, you know, it’s never happened before. So we don’t have to worry about it. You know, even just last year with the wildfires in the Bay Area and in Napa and Sonoma wildfire, wasn’t that was a huge threat for them.
00:06:04:22 – 00:06:29:06
Nora O’Brien
So there was earthquakes at the end. So the point is that and then obviously we know what kind of devastation that happens. So the point is moving forward, it’s it’s really important to not just say, well, this will never happen, but by assessing what your risks are and having a discussion with you and your staff about what really could happen, like, oh, you know, I had never considered and it can be something very simple.
00:06:29:06 – 00:06:48:19
Nora O’Brien
Like we had one client that we went through this process called a hazard vulnerability analysis. And until we had done that and we asked about their sewer because that was one of the questions, you know, your sewer, your system, etc.. And they figured out that they had lost six days of work over the last two years because of their sewer now.
00:06:48:19 – 00:07:16:11
Nora O’Brien
Okay, what does that relate to? Emergency management? Well, they fix the sewer. And then we didn’t have a future issue, which means their business can continue. The whole point is minimizing those business interruptions. And a lot of people think it has to be from a president to declare disaster. It doesn’t. It could be a water main break in your own building only affects your business, but that still means that you can’t, you know, continue unless you have a process in place.
00:07:16:17 – 00:07:20:12
Nora O’Brien
And so contingencies for how to continue, that’s cool.
00:07:20:12 – 00:07:42:04
Daniel Ramsey
And so if you’re listening right now, like I want to answer the question, why should you be on this call? Right. So if you have employees, if you have client files, if you if you’re in business, I mean, that’s who should be here. Most business planners are like me. I’m always thinking, how can I grow my revenue? I’m not thinking about how do I protect my business?
00:07:42:04 – 00:08:01:17
Daniel Ramsey
So this is a shift for most of us. And if you’re here, like just go ahead and say hello. Say where you’re from, and know that Nora is open to answering questions. I’ve never personally met somebody who’s worked on a pandemic, so tell me that’s Dory. Tell us what happened with that.
00:08:01:23 – 00:08:28:11
Nora O’Brien
That was pretty intense. So I worked at the time for the California Primary Care Association, representing the nonprofit community clinics, and spent a lot of time with the California Department of Public Health in pandemic planning meetings. We spent many, many what I called Debbie Downer meetings to talk about the modeling will so from the 1918 pandemic, since we have 40 million people roughly in California, we’re going to have all these deaths.
00:08:28:11 – 00:08:46:01
Nora O’Brien
We’re we’re going to put all this, you know, what are we going to grow all the dead bodies? We’ve had those kinds of conversations and then H1N1 happened. You know what? We didn’t count on with H1N1 was, yes. In fact, it was a pandemic because it was widespread. It just wasn’t as deadly, thank the Lord as we expected.
00:08:46:10 – 00:09:19:20
Nora O’Brien
But the whole process of pandemic and the transmission from person to person and and understanding how you how you protect your workers, how you protect your staff, are you protect, you know, kids from spreading those those germs widely, etc., that it was just an interesting process. So when H1N1 headway was acquired experience to the day they declared the who declared the pandemic, we were not.
00:09:19:20 – 00:09:38:10
Nora O’Brien
It was in that situation. I remember at that point, I think I had charge by phone like five times that day because I kept on like I literally had cauliflower ear. I spent so much time on the phone with colleagues all over the country saying, oh, holy, holy hell, what are we going to do? And we’ve been doing planning for seven years.
00:09:38:10 – 00:09:47:22
Nora O’Brien
At that point. But, you know, we’re still like even though we’re we’re prepared, we were better fairly prepared. We still had gaps. And there’s always a better way to do things.
00:09:48:08 – 00:10:08:18
Daniel Ramsey
Yeah. And I think as a business owner, you never really know how prepared you should be. I mean, things like I was just thinking because you said phone calls. I was thinking, gosh, if there was a disaster here and we couldn’t come to work, who would call who and how would we? What would we tell our clients? Like, I haven’t worked out any of that communications stuff.
00:10:08:19 – 00:10:28:03
Nora O’Brien
We do that. So that’s part of the part of our planning process. We set up a tree, we’ve set up a system to call your staff, to call your patients, to call your customers, whatever that is, and put out our communique, alternate communication plan of how are you going to communicate to staff what to say to them and how to staff them.
00:10:28:03 – 00:11:02:16
Nora O’Brien
And then also for your customers, you know, put information on your social media, on your website, you know, our facilities closed. We’re now treating patients if you happen to work a lot with health care organizations. So that’s our go to. But you know, if you’re an organization that you’re not going to do what you run your business out of an ulcer location, you know, and that’s something that we always consider as like you have to think ahead of where else to do, you know, and because you’ve got mud and you know, you’re using virtual assistants, you understand the virtual sameness of our kind of our process.
00:11:02:16 – 00:11:29:12
Nora O’Brien
But the point is, you have to think of that’s part of the the questions that we ask about your recovery strategies. You know, a lot of people like to think that you have to have everything in place. You don’t. But you should think what has to come up with in 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours, you know, 24 hours, 72 hours of your business process, your supply chain, your staff, your facility, your location and your system.
00:11:29:18 – 00:11:38:03
Nora O’Brien
So those that when we do business continuity planning, that’s what we those kinds of questions that we’ll probe to you and have you think about what those things look like.
00:11:38:15 – 00:11:58:02
Daniel Ramsey
That’s crazy. We have a what’s cool is we already have a question coming in right. Who is the ideal candidate in the business who should own the responsibility for like the process and the drills and like right as a small business owner or a good sized business, like who owns that?
00:11:58:24 – 00:12:21:09
Nora O’Brien
So that’s an excellent question because it’s going to live in different places, different in different, different types, right. Depending on your size of your organization like it might be in someone that’s your operations department, that’s a good place for it to live because they’re already knowing what your business processes, you know, depends on what your business type is.
00:12:21:09 – 00:12:42:05
Nora O’Brien
What you don’t want to do is solely focus on the 90 because that’s that’s the old way of thinking around business continuity of, oh, well, my data is backed up. I can still run my business. Well, your data is one critical piece to your business, but so is your business process. Your system, your your payroll system and your, you know, all those kinds of things.
00:12:42:13 – 00:13:03:24
Nora O’Brien
It’s also your your people that are going to run these things and your actual work location. Are you going to work remotely? Are you going to work from you know, from can you work hard and part of your business? And also supply chains. Supply chains, an issue too. So it’s going to live in different places. But ideally what you want to do is have it be multidisciplinary.
00:13:03:24 – 00:13:42:19
Nora O’Brien
This is the one big hot tip we want to share with you is that you don’t want to have it rest on one person’s shoulders. Number one, if you had four or five departments in your and maybe two and maybe your small business, a team of five, you know who does operations. You kind of want to have several people to think about what your Balter business processes and what kind of plans you should do, etc. You want to it’s going to live in different places based on your and your business size, but ideally you want to have it to be someone that represents your i.t and your operations and your admin so that you’re looking
00:13:42:21 – 00:13:56:05
Nora O’Brien
holistically about your business because we only have your i.t personally the effort ideally it’s only going to be an IT focused event and plan and that’s the only one critical piece. But now you’re only just your business.
00:13:56:16 – 00:14:12:16
Daniel Ramsey
Yeah. Makes sense. What’s interesting about what you’re talking about is I like how in-depth does do should all of the employees be like I you know, I wouldn’t know how much time to spend on this. What’s reasonable would be.
00:14:13:14 – 00:14:34:21
Nora O’Brien
A really good question. So what we like to do is we like to have some kind of safety committee, you know, a small subset of folks that actually help develop a plan. But then once the plan is developed and really how you operationalize it is you involve the staff and you train the staff on what your procedures are, what your process is.
00:14:35:01 – 00:15:05:11
Nora O’Brien
And so that they and one have that, it’s like, hey, my employer really cares about whether I know what our shelter in place policies or evacuation policy is, etc. What’s also important to you and how you really give them the muscle memory. So it’s actually living and breathing is training and testing. So we test the plan with drills and exercises and those drills can be a discussion based exercise that we do all the time or a full scale exercise, lights and sirens.
00:15:05:18 – 00:15:27:18
Nora O’Brien
You know, again, we work mostly with health care organizations, so 58 patients with blood and impalement, we can do all of those things. But really that you bring it together with that training and testing piece and then what’s more important is it’s not you’re just doing a drill for the sake of a drill. The whole point is you want to fail spectacularly during a drill, but not during disaster.
00:15:27:18 – 00:15:50:01
Nora O’Brien
So you want to fail because you want to fail and find out where your plan gaps are. Oh, well, we when we developed the plan, we started this, but when we ran through the scenario we found, we did either we needed other resources or we needed other people, or we forgot something. And then you take those plan findings, write an after action report, which our director training is exercises.
00:15:50:01 – 00:16:02:19
Nora O’Brien
Chris just let us do. Right. So those exercise reports is after action reports and actually implement your improvement plan to say here is a plan gaps or update the plan based on those findings.
00:16:03:18 – 00:16:26:19
Daniel Ramsey
Is this a and we’re going to cut real quick to talk about your virtual professional and then we’ll continue. But is this a six month process? Give somebody an idea of like how long it will take for somebody like me who we don’t have a lot of plans. I mean, fire and yeah, we have fire because fire, fire because it’s.
00:16:28:01 – 00:16:54:03
Nora O’Brien
For a small organization. I mean, we could probably probably get start to finish in about three months and that would be with the process that we’ve used and we’ve worked successfully is we do a hazard vulnerability analysis to identify what your risks are. We do a look at what your existing plans are, and if you have none, that’s a little bit easier in some ways because we’re kind of starting from scratch.
00:16:54:08 – 00:17:13:13
Nora O’Brien
But we have templates that we’ve created that are proprietary to us, that we’re with our clients and that we kind of have all the key elements that you need to have us in an order of succession and who’s in charge and how you activate and who’s it, all those kinds of things. So we do that and then we get get back and forth on the plan.
00:17:13:14 – 00:17:32:10
Nora O’Brien
Then we train you on what the plan elements are so your staff knows what those things are. You sit with that, and then we do an exercise to test it and then we update the plan. So it’s an iterative process, I would say, you know, three, maybe six months depending on, you know, other other things you have going on.
00:17:32:10 – 00:17:46:23
Nora O’Brien
But our goal is to not just give you a piece of paper. It’s the planning process that’s very valuable. That also helps to give you that muscle memory of, Oh, yeah, now, now remember what we’re doing, right?
00:17:47:17 – 00:18:19:14
Daniel Ramsey
I love it. Okay. You know, real quick, because I get an opportunity to work my out as is ten years old, 5000 clients. I get an opportunity to talk to a lot of business owners just like yourself. Nora And what’s cool is I love how you’re using your virtual professional because that’s how I started using them, right? So what let’s talk a little bit about how you kind of harnessed, you know, the virtual model to make you more efficient and drive more revenue for your business.
00:18:19:14 – 00:18:48:03
Nora O’Brien
So for us so Jerome, he is really good on our website. He’s making sure we’re doing a website revamp right now and saying, hey, by the way, we want to make sure you get, you know, pull it off, whether great photos or pulling together our blogs in a better way and reorganizing things. So he’s great at that. He’s scheduling I mean, we we always want more clients and we always the thing we always value is channel partners.
00:18:48:09 – 00:19:02:03
Nora O’Brien
So whether you’re a consultant that does something similar to what we do or whether it’s my system, so we’re always doing so. He does tons of scheduling for us for existing clients.
00:19:02:03 – 00:19:03:04
Daniel Ramsey
There is one right now.
00:19:03:12 – 00:19:35:15
Nora O’Brien
And they’re doing right now and yeah and and so etc.. So he does a lot of closed scheduling for us and for our staff of, with our clients which are all over the country. By the way, we’ve just been blessed that we have we’ve done projects in 32 states and so that’s exciting. What I also appreciate about him is that he keeps our staff and for me, you know, running our staff meetings and come on, we got to get together, we got to get together, work all this project.
00:19:35:15 – 00:19:38:01
Nora O’Brien
So is appreciate I appreciate that about him.
00:19:38:16 – 00:20:01:14
Daniel Ramsey
Awesome. I do want to say what I what I love is your guy is scheduling you’re keeping track of your calendar, getting you in front of more clients, organizing your day. Because what we do is we help people grow revenue and then we help save them money. In fact, we’re about 60% of the you know, we’re going to save you 60% on your on staffing.
00:20:01:14 – 00:20:28:19
Daniel Ramsey
So the way you’re using your virtual professional is phenomenal. And I think if you’re listening to this call and you’re thinking about it, you know, we’d be happy to do a consultation. We’re also going to give away nor as 12 point assessment, risk assessment, so that she can like kind of guide you through. And if you fill that out and you want to meet with her, she’s been gracious enough to give you a 30 minute consultation on top of that.
00:20:29:00 – 00:20:51:15
Daniel Ramsey
So just jump on our website, sign up, say you want Norah’s 12 point assessment and and come talk to us about saving money and growing your company. So 3 to 6 months to build the thing and then we’ll test it. What I mean is as a business owner and, you know, let’s say you’re, you know, between, you know, a million bucks and 10 million is kind of the norm, right base.
00:20:52:06 – 00:20:57:03
Daniel Ramsey
What would you say the cost should be to create this plan?
00:20:58:01 – 00:21:25:20
Nora O’Brien
It depends. If you want both an emergency operations plan and a business continuity plan. But ideally, what we like to do, we also do it disaster recovery plans to basically the more services you kind of add on, the better. So better rate we can give you. And our goal is to meet your budget as best we can. I would say budget, you know, between 10 to 20000 depending.
00:21:26:05 – 00:21:46:16
Nora O’Brien
And again, that might be we just when you might we might be refreshing what you currently have or maybe we’ll just do a plan review or maybe just drill develop your training and exercise program. Yeah. So so that’s the other thing too. I’d say that the issue is, is it’s a good investment in making sure that you know what to do.
00:21:46:16 – 00:22:13:23
Nora O’Brien
The whole point of these plans is not just to give you a plan, but say you know who to call, what to say, what steps to take. You know what’s moving forward, what the recovery looks like. That’s what that’s what you get out of the process. And oftentimes your insurance company might give you some kind of discount if you have a business continuity plan in place or plan, you know, if you have a robust system.
00:22:15:06 – 00:22:37:20
Nora O’Brien
And one other tip that I’d also offer is, look for your staff that either, you know, has a bent for preparedness, maybe they’re a Girl Scout leader, or maybe they are ex EMS, or they were in the military. They kind of have them and help them to develop your culture of preparedness. Let’s co add them to your safety.
00:22:38:09 – 00:23:14:22
Daniel Ramsey
I love that. Okay. So if first of all, like I said in the beginning, 40% of businesses fail when there’s a disaster. So in my world, 10,020 is is fine, especially if it’s going to take that number to zero if a disaster hits us. Right. You know, we just won’t fail that that for me, feels good. Your 12 point assessment, if I’m listening right now and I want to just kind of, you know, go through that and really kind of design what’s the you know, what are the main disasters to worry about as an entrepreneur?
00:23:14:22 – 00:23:18:24
Daniel Ramsey
And and what is the thinking associated with those four?
00:23:19:02 – 00:23:39:16
Nora O’Brien
That’s one point is, yes, it really gets you to ask you and your team and it might be your team of five or 50. I don’t know what that number looks like, but gets you to think about it’s based on our 12 point assessment is based on industry best practices right have robust plans. Have you thought about orders of succession?
00:23:39:21 – 00:24:07:22
Nora O’Brien
Have you ever thought of who’s going to be in charge? And you thought about putting together a business plan to identify your alternate business process? Do you have some kind of have you have past expense experiences, disasters? How would that impact your business? Have you what have steps have you taken moving forward? It’s it’s a more of a for you to assess for yourselves we encourage you to do is give us a call send you know schedules you have drawn.
00:24:07:22 – 00:24:30:15
Nora O’Brien
I’ll be happy to send you a meeting request reach out to us because we want to ensure that we want to make sure you know what to do because moving forward, we’re going to continue to have more severe weather events. So what is where you are in the world? I’m going to continue have more severe weather events. It’s just going to get worse at this point.
00:24:30:15 – 00:24:54:20
Nora O’Brien
It’s about resiliency. We want to make your organization as resilient as possible. And by taking this in advance, no one wants to think this is this is not dead sexy. Okay. I’m sorry to say a lot for things, but it will make your organization more resilient and more importantly, make your business be able to be not be in that 40% category.
00:24:55:03 – 00:25:24:08
Nora O’Brien
It does go with disaster strikes. And again, disaster doesn’t have to be a presidential declared disaster. It could be your water main building. I mean, I had a really small story of a business that they lost their their supply chain, their a restaurant and they a potpie restaurant in Placerville. That was one of my favorite ones. We went to my family was there all the time and they lost their supplier and they couldn’t find an alternate supplier.
00:25:24:14 – 00:25:25:24
Nora O’Brien
So they went out of business.
00:25:26:06 – 00:25:36:21
Daniel Ramsey
So I will go because I’m so we’re in Sacramento, California, and I would go to Tahoe and that potpie place I know. Yeah, it was my, one of.
00:25:36:21 – 00:25:54:21
Nora O’Brien
My favorite places to my you would only go camping past the Z part place because he knew he’s going to cozy by well they’re closed because they lost their there they lost their supply chain. They couldn’t they couldn’t find a supplier for one of their key ingredients for their price. And they’re gone now.
00:25:54:21 – 00:26:05:04
Daniel Ramsey
So geez, what’s what are some of I mean, we talked briefly and you explained that 90% of disasters are water based.
00:26:05:10 – 00:26:05:22
Nora O’Brien
That’s right.
00:26:06:24 – 00:26:10:11
Daniel Ramsey
Let’s go through the like top five disaster and talk about.
00:26:10:15 – 00:26:33:00
Nora O’Brien
Be related to like the storm surge related to a hurricane. It could be related to the storm surge related to tornado. It could be related to a tsunami. It could just be related to historic floods like we saw last summer in hurricane with the hurricanes. So we no one ever predicted 67 inches of rain, but that’s what we had.
00:26:33:00 – 00:26:52:13
Nora O’Brien
And moving forward, again, we can’t count on historical modeling to tell us what the future will bring. So that’s so that’s what it’s all about. But so 90% of those floods are horrific and they do more damage than you ever think because it’s not just the flood itself. So let’s say you clear out your building and you take all the water out.
00:26:52:13 – 00:27:12:22
Nora O’Brien
Well, you’re probably left with mold. So then there’s all those environmental issues you have to deal with and getting out, getting back in the building after there’s been a flood, you know, is a is quite a quite a tough one. And Sacramento, where we are, you know, obviously there’s other places around the world, but, you know, we have the highest flood risk in the nation.
00:27:12:22 – 00:27:39:00
Nora O’Brien
And so it’s not going to take much in order to bring the floods to Sacramento. We have the exact same levee design. And that’s and and they do in many communities around the world and around the country. So the point is, moving forward, just knowing what your risks are. Right. And having a process that we can walk through with you, which doesn’t take that’s all it takes a lot of time.
00:27:39:00 – 00:27:52:11
Nora O’Brien
It maybe takes an hour to walk through where the risks are and the risk of the everything from a cyber breach to a flood to, you know, to a water main break. And what that means and how that might impact your business.
00:27:52:23 – 00:27:58:14
Daniel Ramsey
So Russia could break into my computers and if I spend time with you, you’re going to stop them.
00:27:59:04 – 00:28:01:19
Nora O’Brien
We’ll do our best if I love it or doubt it.
00:28:02:07 – 00:28:10:02
Daniel Ramsey
I love it. Okay. So at other than water, like, what are the next two, three? I mean, if you’re in California like we are break.
00:28:10:10 – 00:28:31:13
Nora O’Brien
I mean, our earthquake, Rick, is it’s off the charts. But the issue with earthquake is that we’ve seen so many communities that have done fracking believe it or not, the risk of the earthquake risk in Oklahoma and other places where they do a lot of fracking is almost the same risk. The South is California due to the fracking.
00:28:31:21 – 00:28:41:16
Nora O’Brien
So the earthquake is a huge one. I mean, we used to say there’s a joke about California. Sure, we have four seasons slide fire, flu and earthquake. Those are.
00:28:42:04 – 00:28:46:17
Daniel Ramsey
Oh, that’s funny. You flood fire through an earthquake. Right.
00:28:47:19 – 00:29:08:21
Nora O’Brien
Well, the other thing, too, is I’m sorry to say active shooter. I mean, this is not this is you know, it’s it’s gone are the days of this is you know, it was oh, my God, that never happened. There’s no over three I think close to 300 shootings already this year that are you know, and it’s a matter of that situation we don’t want to see.
00:29:08:21 – 00:29:31:23
Nora O’Brien
So that’s something that we do to we have our trainer, director of training and exercises that is a master exercise practitioner. We do active training. We’ve done active shooter drills with clients during their work hours, you know, and try and work with law enforcement to bring them in to teach them a read hindsight skills and to teach them how to do that.
00:29:32:16 – 00:29:58:13
Nora O’Brien
Ransomware is a I’m sorry, the cyber breach is is a really high threat for many and it used to be just for large it used to be just for large companies. You know, you see small organizations now being compared to a ransomware or a data breach that that really can impact and cripple your ability to be able to use your IP and against systems.
00:29:58:17 – 00:30:23:10
Daniel Ramsey
That active shooter thing it’s even impacted me a little bit. Real quick, though, James has already requested the 12 point risk assessment opinion. Yeah, we’ll get that to you, James. I’m a wrestling coach at a local high school and this year, you know, we’ve seen some of Nora’s work just this year because all the gates are closed until the bell rings.
00:30:23:18 – 00:30:48:20
Daniel Ramsey
And then the moment the bell rings and school’s out, they open the gate, but they only open it for 10 minutes. So there’s like a ten minute window for me to get into the school after school’s over. And otherwise I have to go around and use my key to get in. And I think I you know, that is just that’s the reality of today’s world schools large office complex.
00:30:48:20 – 00:30:58:21
Daniel Ramsey
You know, we’re just we’re in a different space. And there weren’t ever been it like when I was a kid, you know, getting into a fight was kind of the normal, you know, now it’s like a whole new world, you know?
00:30:58:23 – 00:31:21:10
Nora O’Brien
It is. You know, we just did also a workplace violence policy webinar, if anyone would like to know, would be happy to send you the recording of that we did with a local h.r. Consulting firm. And what we’re talking about is as a manager, what are good things to know and how to develop a good solid workplace violence policies.
00:31:21:10 – 00:31:24:05
Nora O’Brien
So we’d be happy to send you that that recording.
00:31:24:15 – 00:31:44:10
Daniel Ramsey
Yeah, we’ll grab that. That’d be that’d be amazing. Okay, guys. So a lot of stuff is going on here. I want to kind of serverless up. We’re almost done. I’d like to keep us to 30 minutes or so, but so we’re going to get you. Nora’s 12 point assessment for sure. Jump on my desk dot com, ask for a consultation and we can get you the video.
00:31:44:10 – 00:32:11:10
Daniel Ramsey
We can get you her contact information, everything you need to to basically move your business forward and be prepared for disaster. And if you need help, that’s what we do. We help people with leverage. We’ve got a question from Facebook How does MOD manage its offshore employee disaster plan? Well, here, here’s an interesting thing about our our biggest risk over there is typhoons.
00:32:12:01 – 00:32:36:05
Daniel Ramsey
It’s Southeast Asia. There’s every year we have them. So we have two things. We have a backup Internet plan. So everybody has their primary and then everybody has a secondary. We also have a secondary location. So if one area is flooded, I mean, I have pictures this this sinks to our heart of who we are and what we do, because every year we deal with disaster multiple times.
00:32:36:16 – 00:33:11:04
Daniel Ramsey
But we have this photo, it’s a great photo of one of our virtual professionals who works for a dear friend of mine and a client. She is on her roof with her laptop and a bag. Her kid and her entire building is flooded and she’s on like the third story or something like this. So we just we have massive plans in the Philippines about how to protect not only not only your virtual professional and their family, but also be able to come back to work when the water is, you know, gone down.
00:33:11:17 – 00:33:16:07
Daniel Ramsey
But this is just a reality of our business because we’re in Asia right.
00:33:16:07 – 00:33:39:22
Nora O’Brien
And that actually happened in the monsoon about a month ago with our virtual professional. He has an alternate. He just you just phone each other this phone in order for us to connect. And we stayed in touch and, you know, we made sure that he was okay from related to the floods and where he was. So that we want to obviously make sure that he’s okay.
00:33:40:05 – 00:33:42:02
Nora O’Brien
Yes. We communicate in that way.
00:33:42:18 – 00:33:52:20
Daniel Ramsey
Well, Nora, thank you for your time. This has been phenomenal. Guys, reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you. And and thanks for helping us think differently.
00:33:53:15 – 00:34:03:04
Nora O’Brien
We’re hoping we’re hoping, you know, it’s just a matter. This is a, I’m sorry to say, a brave new world. And anything we can do to support you, we’re happy to do it.
00:34:03:19 – 00:34:09:18
Daniel Ramsey
All right. Thanks so much for your time. They got a bye bye bye.
