August 30, 2011
OPEN Forum Message
Watch MSNBC's Your Business
If you missed this week's show or want to catch up on past episodes, you can find the videos on OPEN Forum.
View videos
Joelle Obsatz considers herself very lucky. As co-owner of Butterfield Market, Kitchen, Café and Catering, all located in New York City’s Upper East Side, her third generation business was at the center of what was to be the storm of the century: Hurricane Irene.
Thankfully, she just came away with a little flooding—the result of hefty preparation thanks to her employees.
On Friday morning, she gathered her team for an emergency meeting. “We put protective tarps over our equipment, we took our servers out of our server room, and we shut off our phone equipment and electrical equipment; we even disassembled the awning to our market, which was a big production,” she says.
Preparation continued on Saturday morning. Obsatz knew that her floors were subject to reverse drainage backups, so she sealed each floor drain to protect against flooding. Then, employees removed products from lower shelves.
All the while, the market stayed open. “Our market is located near Lenox Hill Hospital; we are a community business and people were looking for prepared food; we needed to stay open,” she says.
Some customers felt the need to stock up, big time.
“One woman came in and bought 12 fancy chorizos—I thought, ‘You are going to get a stomach ache,’” she says. “The mood was to horde all you can, so people were buying a lot.”
Around 3:30 p.m., as evacuation notices streamed through the airwaves, Obsatz closed her market (the market was not in the evacuation zone) and released the 20 employees still there. By this time, mass transit was shut down in New York City, so she had to improvise.
“We piled our employees into our delivery vans and private cars and drove them home to Brooklyn and Queens,” she says.
With her employees safe, Obstaz went back to the market, climbed the stairs to the upper level of the building and walked into her home. She switched on CNN and waited. “I was so bored; I had nothing to do—we had unplugged our servers so I couldn’t even get on the Internet,” she says.
The rain came and on Sunday she went downstairs to assess the wreckage. A small amount of water damage had warped her office floor, but other than that, the coast was clear. “Had the storm been worse, there would have been more damage; on Monday everything was back to normal,” she says.
Kenneth C. Wisnefski
About 86 miles south in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, Kenneth C. Wisnefski, founder and CEO of WebiMax, an online marketing company, also feels fortunate.
“Last week was a very strange week on the East Coast; on Tuesday, everyone was piling out of the office because of the earthquake and then Saturday was the hurricane,” he says.
Employees felt the earthquake strongly, at first thinking it was building construction, but soon realizing it was something much larger.
“No one knew what to do; we were all fine, but it really opened up the discussion of what we should do if more came—and I guarantee that no one on the East Coast had ever thought of creating a hurricane disaster plan,” says Wisnefski. Staff stayed at the office until the end of the day, but when Thursday came with news of an impending hurricane, Wisnefski put disaster measures in place.
The company had a snow plan that included requiring employees to go home with their laptops and a phone tree to disseminate information. Now that plan was being translated for a hurricane.
At first, there was some overreaction. “Some people said we should close our office on Friday, but I decided to wait,” he says. Mandatory evacuations were announced the following day (communities included Wisnefski’s home of Ocean City, New Jersey) and employees left around 2 p.m. on Friday. Before leaving the office, Wisnefski and his team moved equipment into a center of the building as a preparative measure.
“I had to pack up my kids and wife and we ended up going on an impromptu vacation to Hersheypark, deep in Pennsylvania,” he says.
On Saturday, Wisnefski sent out an e-mail to his employees wishing them luck in the storm. On Sunday, all 130 of his employees responded that everything was ok.
“When we got back to the office, everything was fine, but I think that if we had a major flood, it would not have been ok,” he says.
Lessons learned?
“We’ve learned that we have to have a plan to put into action at a moment’s notice,” he says.
Part of the plan includes the construction of an intranet where employees can login from off-site locations to check on next steps.
“We also plan to have a meeting after Labor Day to discuss how what we will do in these situations; I want to make sure people have a full understanding and have the ability to ask questions,” he says.
Check your balance, review recent transactions and pay your bill on the go.
