 Hi, I'm Renee Hanvin and I'm going to talk about five steps you can take to prepare your business for disruption. Disruptions can have a huge impact on your business, including loss of income, damage to your reputation and threats to the health and safety of your employees and customers. Nearly three quarters of Australian businesses recognise they are operating in a disruptive environment, but only one third are prepared to respond to disruption. What is business resilience? Business resilience or business continuity is how your organisation responds and adapts to any unexpected disruptions. Building a resilient business starts with understanding what disruptions you face in your everyday operations. So where do you start? There are many ways your business could experience disruption and the more you can identify and prepare for, the better. Crises that could affect your business fall into two categories, indirect impact and direct impact. Indirect impact events don't directly affect you, but they might affect your local community or Victoria as a whole. This could include natural disasters, man-made events or a terrorist incident that affects your ability to operate. Direct impact events affect you, your business or the people who work in it. So make a list of the type of disruptions that could affect the region you're in, your business premises and equipment, your people and systems such as IT. Once you have your list, consider the impact of each event on your place of business, your people and processes. Can you put backup plans in place to trade through the disruption? Consider what you would do if the disruption lasts for hours, for days or if the flow and effects impact your business in the longer term. For example, imagine your business produces food products that need refrigeration. What would you do if the power went out? This brings up all kinds of risks, like your products perishing, loss of customer data or damage to your reputation if you can't fill orders on time. You might deal with this type of disruption by having a backup generator in place, keeping your electricians' details in hand and running daily computer backups or using off-site cloud storage and having a communication plan in place to keep staff and customers informed. You should also get advice on appropriate insurance in case your business does experience loss. Thinking about disruption isn't enough, you have to act. So write down your emergency plans and make sure they're easy to access. Make sure your staff know what they are and where to find them. If there is a natural disaster while you were away or if you were to fall ill long-term, would your staff know what to do? Don't just write a plan, put it on a shelf and forget about it. We're on a team building day to identify all your business threats. Your staff may have ideas that you haven't thought of. Add it to your weekly meeting agendas and connect with other local businesses to identify shared capabilities and needs. There is a lot of data to verify that businesses ready to adapt to disruptions recover faster than those that don't. So when contemplating whether to spend time on business resilience, consider the financial and reputational risks associated with not planning. Investing time now will better position your business in the good times and help prepare you for the bad. For more useful information on building business resilience, visit business.vic.gov.au