Business success relies on positive thinking. You set clear and ambitious goals, you visualize the steps you need to take to reach those goals and then you follow through on your plans, shrugging off setbacks along the way and hopefully achieving what you set out to do.

You try not to focus on the negative. You know that neither you nor your team members will be inspired by a clear visualization of what failure looks like. Focus on the negative, and you sap morale. So you tend not to ask yourself, "What's the worst that could happen?" You may say to yourself, "I don't need to plan for disaster. Disasters have a way of happening all by themselves." Or, "If all hell breaks loose, I've got a good team - I know they can measure up in a crisis." You probably have enough real problems to lose sleep over - you're not going to worry about what to do if your vice-president gets struck by a meteorite.

Are your plans 'just fine'?
If that's what you think, welcome to the comfortable majority. BusinessWeek ran a poll after a recent CIO summit on disaster recovery. It found that 12 percent of attendants emerged from the summit thinking their disaster recovery plans were just fine. Forty-two percent found that their plans were not as good as they had thought. 46 percent had come to the realization that their plans were completely inadequate.

Now, this survey outcome is not surprising. On the one hand, anybody who has been involved in a business project will be familiar with Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time." And if you are still in business, it's because you know how to deal with these emergencies, such as computer crashes, late delivery of vital documents or supplies, or unplanned absences of key team members.

So you focus on dealing with these common emergencies, rather than asking yourself questions such as, "What will I do if I arrive at work and find water pipes have burst overnight, flooded the office, destroyed our records, contracts and contact numbers, made all our IT hardware inoperable, wrecked half the furniture and basically put us out of operation for at least a week?"

You don't ask yourself that question because, on any given day, that's a highly unlikely scenario. However, if you're planning to stay in business for the next twenty years, the odds start to mount up that some disaster of this magnitude will occur on at least one occasion.

A disaster could take the form of a fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado or snowstorm that either damages, destroys, or isolates your business' premises. It could take the form of a power surge that fries your computer systems and the intellectual property it contains. It could be a virulent computer virus. It could be a power failure that leaves a warehouse full of perishable goods susceptible to decay. It could be a business disaster, taking the form of a sudden bankruptcy of a major client or supplier, or a sudden and serious illness to a key team member who has irreplaceable knowledge. Of course it could also take the form of the direct or indirect effects of a terrorist attack.

All together, the odds of being affected by a disaster at some time in your business life are not insignificant. So you need to have an effective plan on how to recover from such a disaster. If you have no plan, it may take only one such event to put you out of business.

Ensure your business can survive a crisis.
BusinessWeek quotes statistics indicating that, when businesses suffer a major loss of some kind, half of them fail within a year. Another 25 percent fail the following year. If these statistics seem surprising, think about how finely balanced most businesses are. Small businesses, in particular, tend not to have large quantities of spare cash floating around. If a business can't operate for a number of weeks, it can sink into its own miniature recession, cash flow crisis and default on debt repayments.

The business world is increasingly unforgiving of delays or substandard operational performance. For example, many manufacturers have finely tuned their operations, developing close relationships with a single supplier who can be relied on to deliver goods direct to the factory floor, thus cutting inventory costs. The downside is that if one supplier suddenly goes bankrupt, you may have to entirely shut down your operation until you can get a new supplier, because you have no inventory to work with. Your customers are likewise working on tight operational deadlines. If you fail to supply them for a week, you might find they have gone to a competitor.

So a disaster management and recovery plan is essential. Forming a plan will consist of a number of steps. First, you will need to conduct a hazard analysis. What environmental hazards do you face, and where is your business most vulnerable? You should then work out what steps you can take to reduce risks. If you live in an area subject to wildfires, for example, you might clear an area around your business. Or if you find your business is overly dependent on one product, you might want to look into product diversification.

You then need to look at ways to mitigate a disaster. This could involve making sure that your data is backed up regularly and stored at a remote location. Similarly, you could make sure all your records, contracts and contacts are copied and stored remotely. You could implement redundancy in your operating systems - for example, by having several Internet service providers, so that if one fails, you can switch to another. You should also have plans for emergency relocation of your offices.

Get insurance!
And you need to get insurance! Insurance can cover not only your loss of property but also the costs related to income interruption. When considering financial matters, you can get your RAN ONE accountant to help you analyze your business and work out how much insurance you need. This will depend on, for example, the financial consequences of catastrophic failure in various parts of your operation. Your RAN ONE accountant can also help you work out the amount of time you can afford to be shut down. This will give you a better idea of how to invest in procedures to get your business up and running again.

You also need to do your own research. For example, there is good information on the website of the US Small Business Administration, at www.sba.gov/disaster. The website links to a comprehensive booklet for small businesses. You can also find a sample disaster plan at www.disasterplan.com. So, from time to time you need to think negatively and when you do, you should do so in a thorough and systematic way. It can save your business.