Earl Wilson for The New York Times Alexandra Mayzler
She Owns It
Portraits of women entrepreneurs.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, She Owns It business group members gathered to talk about how they fared. They also shared lessons learned from this, and past, disasters.
A group member, Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Tutoring, said the storm forced her to cancel tutoring sessions during a busy week when students are typically studying for the Independent School Entrance Exam and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. To the extent possible, she offered substitute tutors and conducted sessions by Skype, but Thinking Caps is still playing catch-up this week.
The storm reminded her that her New York business relies on public transportation, a fact that was driven home several years ago when a snowstorm closed city subways. Back then, her tutors and the parents of Thinking Caps’ students were confused and frustrated. With no plan for inclement weather, no one knew what was expected or how to proceed.
After that storm, Ms. Mayzler created a plan. It states that under certain circumstances — for example, if the subway system or schools are closed — expectations of tutors will be limited. “When we wrote it, we thought we’d never have to use it again,” she said — but it has repeatedly proven valuable. And she believes it helped manage expectations this time around.
While it was too early to tell whether the storm would affect Thinking Caps’ bottom line, Ms. Mayzler said it was unprecedented for the company to have a week with so few lessons, especially during this time of year. “Still,” she said, “it’s not going to put us out of business or make a huge difference.”
Another member of the group, Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, said she, too, considered herself lucky. “We had no power outages and none of our people were really affected,” she said. Ultimately, she said any impact on the Megawatt Hour would be “trivial.” For example, it might take time for potential customers to turn their attention to energy purchasing as business returned to normal.
“We’re basically an Internet business, so my real concern was that our servers would be affected and that we would lose access,” Ms. Lord said. But the company, which helps business clients track and forecast their energy usage and expenses, never lost power. Its servers, which are in Northern Virginia, were untouched.
Like most businesses in the group, the Megawatt Hour uses a cloud computing platform, in Ms. Lord’s case, Amazon Web Services. The system is redundant, she said, meaning it is backed up by secondary resources to guard against failure. “If we had to,” she said, “we could restore all of our data tomorrow if we lost it all tonight.”
Ms. Mayzler raised a related point. “Everyone’s moving to the cloud, and that’s great,” she said. But, she added, an important question is, “Where are those servers?” If you’re having a problem in New York and your servers are in New York, she said, your data will also have a problem. For that reason, Thinking Caps’ servers are located around the country. She also stores and backs up vital information with a few providers, including Dropbox and SkyDrive, to create redundancies.
Ms. Lord said you could request servers in various locations. But, she wondered, “Where is safe these days?”
Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay, missed the storm. She was visiting several of her company’s dress factories in China, Hong Kong and Vietnam. The trip was prompted by continuing quality problems with a Chinese factory (which we’ll discuss in future posts).
At Bari Jay last week, Ms. Parker’s sister and co-owner, Erica Rosenfeld, held down the fort. The company stayed closed Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, it opened for those employees who could get there. A few people in every department came in.
“Were people working from home or were they just taking the day off?” Ms. Mayzler asked.
“Just taking the day,” Ms. Parker said.
Ms. Mayzler asked why they couldn’t work from home.
Bari Jay’s current computer system can’t be accessed remotely, Ms. Parker said — something she has been working to change for more than a year. “Hopefully, by January 1st I’ll be on new Web-based software,” she said. This will allow most employees to work remotely when necessary.
While every other tenant in Ms. Parker’s office building lost Internet service, Bari Jay did not. She isn’t sure why, but she has a theory. Until recently, Bari Jay used Broadview Networks for both its phone and Internet services. Now, the company’s phone service is through Broadview, and it has Internet service through Time Warner.
“I back up my Internet with Broadview, and I back up my phones with Time Warner, so I’m wondering if maybe one of them worked and then the other flipped over,” she said. Previously, when the company lost power, both its phone and Internet service would go down.
“Very smart,” said Ms. Lord.
Although Bari Jay had Internet service, it couldn’t ship dresses, which were stuck in Hong Kong. That was “a big deal for us,” Ms. Parker said. “But I didn’t hear any screaming from stores, so we’re assuming we didn’t have any urgent weddings,” she said. “If anything, I was getting e-mails from people just making sure we were O.K.”
Over all, Ms. Parker doesn’t foresee a big impact on sales. “At end of the day, it’s probably a wash,” she said. While numbers for October will be down, she expects to make up for it by shipping more dresses in November — the ones that weren’t shipped earlier.
Jessica Johnson couldn’t make the meeting because of an obligation unrelated to the storm. I caught up with her by phone — she was on her cellphone because her company, Johnson Security Service, was still without its VoIP phone service, which went out after the storm.
Johnson Security worked throughout the storm, Ms. Johnson said. Her building suffered no damage or loss of electricity and the company can run virtually. Some employees and clients, however, were affected personally. “In situations like this, our clients need coverage, and we had to figure out how to get staff to and from jobs,” she said, noting that the company’s hourly employees who couldn’t get to work will feel the brunt of the storm’s impact because they won’t get paid. Some employees commuted between the Bronx and Manhattan on foot.
The company’s resources were stretched thin, Ms. Johnson said. And during disasters, when property is at risk, demand for guards can increase. “There were some accounts where we had no hours worked, some where we had overtime, and we also have some new opportunities because of the storm,” Ms. Johnson said. Ultimately, she expects the storm to have little impact on her business.
Reflecting on the effectiveness of her company’s constantly evolving disaster recovery plan, Ms. Johnson praised her employees, who stayed in touch before, during and after the storm. She said it would take time to determine what she would have done differently, if anything. “You never know what you need until it’s tested,” she said.
Were there any technologies or gadgets that you found surprisingly useful during the storm?
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Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/the-technologies-that-got-them-through-the-storm/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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