We Had No Contingency Plan for Hurricanes
By Kathryn Hawkins
Terena Bell founded In Every Language, a translation and interpretation services company, in 2005. The nearly $1 million company based in Louisville, Ky., now has three employees and works with 1,200-plus contracted translators and interpreters.
The problem
When Hurricane Ike hit Kentucky in September 2008, Bell's office lost power for a week, leaving the staff unable to finish projects or even communicate with clients and contractors. An utterly disconnected office wasn't exactly a scenario for which Bell had a back-up plan.
The background
At the time, Bell worked with two employees out of a home office that relied heavily on technology: They used a Vonage Internet-based phone service and stored most of their data on an internal server.
Although Bell knew the weather forecast was bad, no one in Louisville was prepared for the impact that Ike would have on the region. "You'd have to be insane to think a hurricane would hit Kentucky," she says. But when the storm hit, the entire city lost power, including Bell's home office.
For a translation services company, meeting tight deadlines is at the heart of the business. If Bell couldn't reconnect soon, she reasoned, the company risked losing valuable client relationships.
The solution
At first, she had no real options. The roads weren't drivable, and no nearby businesses had power or an Internet connection. By the second day after the storm, however, a local Panera Bread had regained power. So Bell and two of her employees set up a makeshift office, bringing a laptop and their cell phones there to recharge their batteries and touch base with their clients and contractors.
Despite the crowds -- every other business owner had the same idea -- and the patchy Internet service, Bell responded to her most urgent emails and alerted the clients that she was working despite the region's weather problems.
The company's server was too large to bring to the café, so Bell lugged along backup data in the form of old-school paper notations. "My employees always complained about taking notation, but I was glad I'd at least been prepared enough for that," she says.
Bell's top priority was to complete projects that were already in progress. As for new business, she took it but only after warning clients that she couldn't commit to precise deadlines. Emergency interpretations, such as those for hospital patients, were the exception -- Bell made every effort to find an interpreter for such clients immediately. If they wanted same-day services, she referred them to the company's competitors in other regions.
Six days after the power outage, Bell's home office power finally returned. "When my lights went back on, and I cried out in relief," she says.
Lessons learned
In the end, In Every Language cancelled about $5,000 in client work because local translators and interpreters weren't reachable, and Bell has no idea how much additional work she may have passed on to her competitors. After the storm had passed, she decided to make some changes.
Bell diversified the company's contractor and client base so that regional weather problems wouldn't be their Achilles' heel. Before Ike hit, at least 80 percent of the company's clients were based in Kentucky. "That percentage is much smaller now," says Bell.
Additionally, Bell moved her data storage from the heavy server to an FTP client in the cloud. "Now we can access it anywhere we can access the Internet," she says. "I also bought a smartphone so I can send and receive emails anywhere there's a cell phone tower."
And despite the company's advances in technology, she hasn't forgotten the importance of old-fashioned recording methods. "We still keep up with those paper notations," she says.
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