Essential Emergency Preparedness for Businesses: Leadership Insights | TAL Global Perspective

What Is Emergency Preparedness for Businesses?

Emergency preparedness for businesses protects operations, revenue, and reputation. Effective business emergency preparedness ensures organizations can withstand disruption, protect stakeholders, and maintain operational continuity. Without a structured continuity strategy, disasters can permanently disrupt organizations. This TAL Global Perspective explores how companies can build adaptable emergency management programs that protect long-term viability. Transcript Below:

Mike Keenan: Hello, I’m Mike Keenan and welcome to the tall global perspective.

Lucien Canton: Hi Mike, it’s good to be here.

Leadership Experience in Emergency Management and Disaster Response

Mike Keenan: As Director of Emergency Services for the City of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004, he was responsible for coordinating the city’s emergency management program and served as a policy advisor on emergency management and homeland security issues to Mayor Willie Brown Jr. He was instrumental in developing the city’s terrorism response capability and coordinated major response plans for a wide range of emergency situations.

Prior to joining the City of San Francisco, Lucien served as an emergency management specialist with FEMA. He assisted in the development of federal disaster response capability, including tactical and strategic planning, interagency coordination, and field operations.

In addition, Lucien served as a senior staff officer on 17 major disasters in Region 9. By the way, Lucien, what is Region 9?

Lucien Canton: That is one of the federal regions in the United States. It includes California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Pacific Trust Territories.

Mike Keenan: Thanks for clarifying that. Those major disasters included the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Northridge earthquake, the Southern California wildfires, and the California winter storms of 1995. His experience also includes extensive deployments on typhoon relief operations in the Pacific Trust Territories and the Caribbean.

He also served as Chief of the Hazard Mitigation Branch, with responsibility for administering post-disaster mitigation programs. He participated in national task forces and working groups that developed the Federal Response Plan and is a co-author of key components of the federal disaster intelligence system.

Lucien served with the U.S. Army in Germany and held a variety of positions in the United States and abroad in the private security industry. His credentials include certification by the International Association of Emergency Managers as an emergency manager and recognition by the DRI Recovery Institute as a certified business continuity professional.

Lucien is the author of Emergency Management: Concepts and Strategies for Effective Programs and numerous articles on emergency preparedness for businesses and security issues. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Business Administration in international management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

So that’s quite a background. Let’s jump into this. My first question for you is: What is emergency preparedness, and why is it relevant to businesses?

Why Emergency Preparedness for Businesses is Essential

Lucien Canton: It’s an interesting question, Mike, because emergency preparedness for businesses is an extraordinarily complex subject. In simple terms, it helps an organization prepare for the unexpected. That sounds straightforward, but it becomes complicated because there are so many different authorities and frameworks telling you what you should be doing.

OSHA has certain requirements for emergency planning. For many organizations, this connects directly to formal business continuity planning and broader emergency management for organizations that must maintain operational resilience. You hear terms like business continuity, business resumption, business preparedness, and crisis management. It can become confusing. But the core idea is simple: it’s about helping the organization prepare for the unexpected.

It becomes relevant because the unexpected can put you out of business. FEMA conducted a study after the Northridge earthquake and found that 40% of the small businesses impacted by the disaster never reopened. Of those that did reopen, only about 29% were still in business two years later.

Your chances of surviving after a disaster increase significantly if you have done some level of preparedness.

After Hurricane Sandy, another study found that roughly 42% of businesses did not have a plan. Of those that did have a plan, only about 13% had shared it with their employees. That has a direct impact on survivability. If preparedness is not integrated into the way your business operates, your chances of surviving a disaster are significantly lower.

Mike Keenan: That makes perfect sense and certainly illustrates the need for a good plan. When you were working with companies, what common mistakes did you see?

Common Emergency Preparedness Mistakes Companies Make

Lucien Canton: If we had the time, we could talk about that all night. But there are four mistakes that I see consistently.

The first is misunderstanding the nature of disaster. When I talk to companies about emergency preparedness for businesses, they tend to think in large-scale terms, earthquakes, floods, fires. Those are important. But emergency preparedness extends to all the things that can disrupt your business.

One major example is reputational risk. An injury to an employee or a problem with your product can have significant impact. When organizations assume emergency planning is only about catastrophic events, they tell themselves, “That won’t happen here.” Once they make that assumption, they disengage from the rest of the planning process.

The second mistake is treating emergency preparedness as something separate from the business itself. True business emergency preparedness must be embedded into governance, operations, and executive decision-making. Companies fail to align preparedness with their business objectives. But the purpose of emergency preparedness is to keep the business operating. It must be integrated into how the organization functions.

The third mistake is believing that having a plan equals being prepared. I often hear, “We’re fine. We have a plan.” Then I ask: Have you shared it with your employees? Does it address specific operational realities? Has it been tested? In many cases, the plan was written by a consultant, placed on a shelf, and assumed to represent preparedness. That is not preparedness.

Finally, there is a tendency to try to plan for everything. Organizations attempt to create a scenario for every possible contingency. You cannot do that. You will exhaust yourself chasing hypotheticals. Instead, what we teach is how to build adaptable plans. The goal is to create a framework that can respond to events you did not specifically anticipate.

Preparedness is about adaptability, not exhaustive prediction.

Mike Keenan:

That’s well said. In my career in retail loss prevention, I’ve seen how security used to operate separately from the business. Over time, it evolved into a core component of business strategy. Your point about integrating emergency management into overall operations is critical.

So let me ask my final question: If I don’t have a program, or I’m part of a new organization just getting started, where do I begin?

How to Start an Emergency Preparedness Program

Lucien Canton: I think the thing to remember is that emergency preparedness is not something you do once and then put on a shelf and consider finished. Sustainable emergency preparedness for businesses requires structure, ownership, and ongoing evaluation. It must be incorporated into the way your business operates.

The way I usually start with organizations is by asking a simple question: How do you deal with a crisis on a day-to-day basis? Every business faces unexpected issues, a shortfall in supplies, a disruption in the supply chain, or a key employee who is suddenly out sick or has resigned. You already have ways of responding to those challenges.

So I ask, who is your brain trust? Who do you involve in decision-making during those situations? Start there. That group becomes the foundation for your planning effort. From that point, you begin asking what could go wrong and how you would respond. You build outward from that core team.

For example, you might begin with senior managers, then realize you need input from engineering, maintenance, or even key vendors.

Lucien Canton: Or input from even one of your vendors and you start building having that brain. Trust is the first part.

Lucien Canton: The second is understanding what’s at risk. What are you really trying to protect? I like to distinguish between physical property and intellectual property. Many organizations focus on the physical facility, but preparedness is also about what makes your company valuable.

I remember working with a bakery once. Their attitude was, “We’ve got insurance. We can replace the equipment.” But I asked, what about your recipes? They paused and said, “Yes, that’s special.” We realized copies needed to be secured because those recipes could not be replaced. They even had a sourdough starter that had been maintained since the Gold Rush.

So again, it’s about understanding what you truly have at risk.

Lucien Canton: And what are your critical processes? What’s going to go wrong, that’s going to cause you heartburn, and how do you solve it? I was working with a group of textiles folks. And what we found was they had a fairly good arrangement with other textile companies where they could use their unused capacity on the night shift, which they ran into problems with their own plant. So things like that processes that you can continue and how would you continue them?

And finally, a lot of times we don’t think about our supply chain and that’s the biggest headache. You had the Sony Ericsson thing many years ago. It’s still a classic that people study. A fire and a clean room. Thousands of miles away from the company. It’s not such a big deal except that it costs them. Something like two hundred million dollars in the first quarter because they hadn’t planned for it.

Lucien Canton: So again, this idea of what is it? That’s going to give you problems. You need your staff to help you identify that. And then the people are going to help you get solutions to it. So that’s where I would start building that brain trust and start looking what our critical processes.

Mike Keenan: that’s great advice, Lucien, and the examples you gave clearly illustrate the need for effectiveness. Planning and I think most of us know other examples as well said and really appreciate your input. So if you’d like to learn more about emergency preparedness for businesses, our experts, or our services, please visit talglobal.com. And as always remember, Be alert and stay safe. Thank you.

About TAL Global

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