Business Continuity: Real Life Stories
Washed Away by Katrina
Makeup and wardrobe consultant, Adrienne Moncrief Hemphill has a similar story. She ran a small but thriving custom-label makeup business out of her Bay St. Louis, Mississippi home that was demolished by Hurricane Katrina. Essentially her most valuable possession was her mailing list of her some 500 customers she kept on her computer.
She lost everything in the storm, her catalogs, her Web site, her inventory of products and most disastrous of all, her mailing list. She was able to relocate to Jackson, Mississippi where she faced the prospect of essentially starting her business over again from scratch.
“I sat down with a woman who worked with me and we tried to recreate my customer list from memory,” she relates. “Eventually we were able to remember about 150 of the 500 customers I had. I was then able to get my web site back up and running and between the web site, a book I had written that has been on sale locally and various stories I have had in the local newspapers regarding my consulting business, over now a two year period maybe another 200 of my former customers have found me – I didn’t find them. So now I have back about 350 of the five hundred customers I had the day Katrina hit.”
But she admits, it has not been easy. But she has learned a valuable lesson. Today all the data on her computer is backed up at a remote location.
Source: http://www.score.org/pdf/HP_Download_ImpactofDisaster.pdf