49% of business leaders have experienced a crisis at their current business… and while three quarters of them believe that a crisis plan would benefit their company, only 51% of businesses have one (Burson-Martsellar 2013-2015).
Why only 51%?
Crisis management is a luxury currently only afforded to big business. Australia’s SMEs do not have the resources to create detailed crisis management plans and form experienced crisis management teams – yet they no are less likely to experience a crisis; from a natural disaster that affects your critical infrastructure to a reputational issue that spirals out of control in the media.
What’s our proposed solution?
A simple and inexpensive DIY toolkit that helps SMEs to build their own basic Crisis Management Plans. After helping you diagnosis your areas of improvement and build your basic Crisis Plan, the toolkit will produce a live-incident module with easy-to-follow procedures and resources for any of your staff to use in the event of a crisis.
Why do SMEs need Crisis Plans?
Because of the statistic on the first line of this article: 49% of businesses have experienced a crisis.
When your buiness experiences a crisis, how will you and your staff handle it? What plans and procedures will you follow? Who will be in charge of liaising with the media? What message template will they use? Who will be making the decisions if your usual manager is unavailable? How will they know what to do?
The expectations of the general public, particularly your key stakeholders, is greater than ever before. The scrutiny of the media, inflamed by the increased access and spread of information via social media and new networks, is greater than ever before.
A crisis or 'critical incident' could come in any form and occur at any time.
If managed poorly, a crisis risks leaving your business crippled for an extended period of time (if not permanently) and threatens the personal careers of your staff.
Progress Update
The various components of this online toolkit have been built off the back off the back of our existing best practice methodology: the Briggs Crisis Ready Process.
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building the online 'DIY' framework and then implementing our best practice methodology into its backend. We hope to have the first version ready for testing in the next couple of weeks.
Once tested and given the green light, SMEs of all industries will be able to diagnose their current level preparedness and highlight any areas for improvemenet, generate a bespoke crisis plan, and access live-incident resources - all designed to provide them with basic crisis management support for whatever incident their business is faced with.
More information
For more detailed information on the various components of the DIY toolkit, head to toolkit's landing page.
To be kept in the loop of any updates, including being the first to know of its release (and subsequent access to the early registration discount), sign up to the mailing list.
As always, if you have any questions, contact us here.