As the Daily Telegraph noted last August (4th August 2008) restaurants, cinemas and theatres got police warnings to prepare for terrorist bombings.

The recent bungling on anti-terrorism and subsequent raids and detention of a number of suspects has not made the police’s work any easier.

Owners and managers of hospitality and entertainment firms will be told to assess their businesses’ likely vulnerabilities to attack and prepare contingency plans for staff in the event of an attack.

Simulated terrorist attach exercises are one way the police are using to try and prevent mass panic by staff at locations that might get hit..

The The National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NCTSO) says on it’s web site that “Attacks around the world have shown that terrorists will attack those targets they perceive as being attractive.”

The problem remains that if your business is destroyed how do you get back into business. In fact more than that how do you proceed when a bomb as gone off. Do you know?

To ask simply ring us here on 0161 339 9700 and we’ll layout the way to improve your response and your likelihood of maintaining your business or at the very least reducing the casualties you could suffer amongst your staff and customers.

A recent survey by the Chartered Management Institute reported that in 2007 about 1 in 3 businesses had business disruptions, due to loss of their IT (39%) or of their people (32%).

Those affected by extreme weather rose from 9% in 2006 to 28% in 2007.

The other categories of disruption were:

• Extreme weather e.g. flood/high winds
• Loss of telecommunications
• Utility outage e.g. electricity, gas, water, sewage
• Loss of key skills
• Negative publicity/coverage
• Employee health and safety incident
• Supply chain disruption
• Loss of access to site
• Damage to corporate image/reputation/brand
• Pressure group protest
• Industrial action
• Environmental incident
• Customer health/product safety issue/incident
• Fire
• Terrorist damage

As you can see business disruption is not only from weather, flood, fire or bomb.

A large part of the ability to keep your business going is down to using a written process to carry out business functions so that if necessary someone else could do the process.

In a similar way identify what you would do if your computer systems were unavailable.