Here in North Devon we have been spared 4′ snow drifts the last few days, but isn’t it mighty cold – on Exmoor I hear it is minus 6 degrees C today – and here the ice on the animal water buckets hasn’t melted.

If you are self employed, or run your own business, how do you cope with bad weather?

For many large corporations, with multiple sites, it is fairly easy to maintain a level of business activity, regardless of the weather, regardless of holidays and regardless of staff sickness, but for the very small business all of these have a major impact on our earning potential.

What can we do as a business to make that impact smaller?

My biggest fear, for which I can do absolutely nothing about is power failure, in my house I can light the log burner and can live in a single room, I can even boil a kettle and maybe bake a potato in it. whilst everything else doesn’t work, but in my office, with no power, I can do nothing. Sure, I can catch up on some reading, I could even manually write a letter, but so much of what I do relies on the internet and to do that I need power!

If it has snowed as well, I cannot get out of my rural premises to find somewhere else to work either, so I would be well and truly up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

However, that is an extreme situation (albeit that there are many homes in the UK right now who are experiencing just that) and in the main I think it is all about planning!

We all need to have a backup plan – in corporate speak we used to call that having a Disaster Recovery Plan – how are you going to do all the necessaries if you are sick, if you are on holiday or if the weather is so bad you cannot travel?

So, what are your hints & tips on how best to get over these problems?

Do you use a VA/PA service to answer your calls and take messages?

Do you have someone else you can call on to make those necessary trips to the post office for example?

Do you have part time staff that you can call on to cover?

Well, what do you do?