 Within just a few seconds, there was about a foot of water in that lost basement. We never thought we'd lose everything. A lot happened so fast. I grabbed my keys, everything else is gone. That's a 99 Chevy pickup that actually, you can see the rear wheels are in front of the front wheels. It actually buckled it backwards. On a quiet Sunday evening, the 960 residents of Northwood were not expecting a tornado to ravage 90% of their community. You don't think it's ever going to happen to you, number one, a tornado. I've lived here all my life, you know, 55 years and never seen one. When the tornado hit, I was out of town. I mean, and my children called me on the phone and when I heard that egg vice was destroyed, it was just a gut-wrenching experience. We couldn't look up any parts. Basically, you couldn't tell anybody if they wanted to come in and pay a bill what they owed you. It's like anything, those computers are great when they're working. When they go down, you're pretty helpless. Fortunately, these three businesses continue to operate, but that's not always the case. In the aftermath of a major disaster, 40 to 60% of small businesses fail to recover. Being ready means being prepared. We try to think through scenarios of what if. What if the power goes out for a day, for a week, for a month? What if our equipment fails? What if the ceiling falls in, rainstorm, whatever, so that we can't be in business? How do we pay our employees? You're never going to prepare 100%, but at least you're going to have some form of direction. It's always better to look back and have something to go by than to wish you had something to go by. You may be a very successful business person, but if you don't make your mat, if you don't put your plans together, you may not be successful. It's very easy to fail. We could definitely see the difference in the businesses that were prepared versus the ones that were not. I mean, the ones that were prepared in the midst of all this turmoil and devastation, they could make clear sound decisions. They could already take their steps to recovery. The ones that weren't prepared were in here asking for help. They were desperate for information and advice, and they were just looking anywhere and everywhere for someone to help them. We have this clear plastic tub with a red lid for emergency that we store everything in. Carol Prafke uses a ready business plan to be prepared for the unexpected. If we would lose power, we had major power surge, we would lose all of our client files and our financials because we do our own accounting and everything but payroll, and so if we lose it, recovery would be really difficult. Thomas Jefferson is an insurance agent that meets with his clients on a regular basis. Keeping up on the details ensures each business maintains the best possible protection. We need to see the actual physical location do an inspection of how do they protect this business outside of insurance. So what we're doing is trying to prevent a loss in the business, showing them how they should prevent that loss. Like it or not, myself and my agent every year, when we renew, we go through the whole policy page by page. He hates it, I hate it, but we catch things in there that maybe we should up this or we should lower this and we do a lot of what-ifs and tornadoes have been mentioned a few times when we've reviewed our policy and I was one, that'll probably never happen, but it did. With a minimal investment of time and money, you can complete a ready business plan that reduces your business downtime in the event of a disaster. Whether your business might be threatened by a flood or water spilled on a laptop, a tornado, a trucker strike, a break-in or a fire, being prepared can help you reduce business disruption, reduce financial losses, reduce damages to equipment or inventory, bolster business security and credibility. Being ready benefits your business, but it also extends to others. At this facility we had 40 workers in place. If you displace those 40 workers, that would be a tragedy to the community. It's just like dominoes and one business not preparing properly for a catastrophe has this trickle-down effect on all of the other businesses. Because it can happen to you, be prepared. Here's how. Go to www.ready.gov and click on Ready Business. Or contact your local extension office to see if the educators will be teaching ready business classes in your area. Or go to www.edin.lsu.edu and click on Online Learning Opportunities to walk you through the process to develop your business continuity plan. Any of these will help you plan to stay in business. Talk to your people. Protect your investment. We prepared our continuity plan because we recommend it to small businesses and nonprofits for them to do it. So we thought it was very important for us to do it and have know the process and how long it took and how much it cost. But then we had to use it. And the peace of mind of knowing that I could come in here and in 20 minutes I knew that my financial records, my client files, my equipment, my software, everything was safe and we could operate either if we could come back to the office or we could operate out of my home or my car or wherever we needed to and everything was safe. Is there any reason not to prepare your business or employees? Probably the most common response you're going to get is lack of time or money. Then you have the ones that are just overwhelmed by the information that's out there and they don't know how to research it. Or they think they have to hire some specialist or consultant and then they see the dollar signs again in budget and think, no, can't do that. Then again there's others that just say it's not going to happen to me. I mean, people do tend to say that and we know otherwise in Northwood that it can happen anywhere, anytime.