Alright, welcome back to Mastering Risk. I am your host, Dr. D. Today.
We're starting off 2026 talking about preparedness for small business. The world, the YouTube, everybody's full of all kinds of proper channels I talk about skies falling, two years of food in your basement, all of this other crap move out of the city. Nobody's doing any of that. 80% of us are urban.
We run small businesses. So what exactly one of the five things that you as a small business owner can do from a small business owner to get ready for a significant major power outage? Real-world examples, real-world ideas things you can do right now that cost zero dollars, a bit of time and effort, sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage. Let's get out of it.
Alright, welcome back. Listen, the first thing that you need to do is understand that you live in an environment where significant risk exists when a prolonged power outage happens. Across the United States of America and other countries, they estimate somewhere between 90 to $150 billion are lost every year due to loss of access to critical infrastructure. So when we're talking about the loss of power, grid power, we're talking about critical infrastructure.
And the reason that's important is if you think about society and we talk about this at our Roadmap to Resilience. We've got a long form video here on YouTube that's almost two hours long that walks you through the entire Roadmap to Resilience, which is our strategy that we developed after over a decade of research, realistic actual things people can do to build resiliency in their life. It is free of charge. It's available here on YouTube.
It's over on our sub stack as well and on the podcast if you prefer those mediums. But when we talk about the world around us, this technological enabled, marveled world, look, you're watching me on some device somewhere in this world. We have listeners in 111 countries around the world and on six continents, maybe even Antarctica, but we'll see. The whole point is we live in a technologically enabled society.
That means every day you and I get up and we assume that a whole series of things will just work, right? You get up, you flick the switch in your bedroom, you expect the power to be on. You open up your smartphone in the morning with your coffee. You expect the internet to be working.
You expect your favorite apps to be up and running. You expect the stove to work, the gas to work. Just if you think for a second, the myriad of systems that you just assume will be there for you every single day you get up. It's phenomenal.
The amount of things that are maintained by other people that we don't provide any consideration to, but they're technologically required. Those are your critical infrastructure. In North America, there's a different system for codifying it. In Canada, they're codified into 10 sectors of critical infrastructure.
In the United States of America, that's codified in 16. And so when you look at that diagram that we just put up there, it shows you the difference. But basically everything from medical to transportation to food to manufacturing to government operations to financial support, it's all a piece of critical infrastructure. The reason we focus on a power outage is because most of those, if not all of them, require power to deliver the service to you.
And when the power grid goes down for longer than a day or so, you start to see a cascade of dominoes where the rest of the critical infrastructure fails. So when we look at grid-down scenarios, I'm not concerned about the first 24 hours of power outage because of a storm. Nobody really cares. It's uncomfortable.
Some people enjoy it. You get to sit around and maybe play some board games, get the kids away from the iPads. But in reality, it's just an inconvenience. We get over it.
What do you do if you're a business owner and you're looking at prolonged power outage? However, you run your business, whether you're like me and you're on a small meeting business, the generates, you know, 50, $60, $70,000 a year top line. But it's all digital. My entire business is digital from the production of these videos to the podcast, to our social media feeds, to our download courses that are available to the services that I offer people in our in our fractional chief risk officer system.
All of that is digital. I need power. I need the internet. And I most definitely need the cell network for me to connect and provide value to my customers and clients.
And so most of the small businesses, unfortunately, are the ones who feel the biggest bunch, the biggest hit from downtime when it comes to loss of the power grid because of our over-reliance on it and the less ability for us to have a significant financial cushion. I've said this before in a couple of previous videos about needing a financial runway for downtime. But a lot of the realistic is a lot of small and medium businesses don't have 30 days of overhead sitting in a cash account doing nothing. Most of the time, like me, I have a runway of I have a line of credit worth about three months of operating expenses.
Now, there's nothing on the line of credit. It just exists for when the unfortunate day happens that my business is offline for, say, 60 days, for whatever reason, some piece of critical infrastructure goes down. And I still need to pay the bills. That's there.
We're not talking about catastrophic end-of-life grid collapse, apocalyptic stuff that you see on YouTube. Though it does do very well. And it does get thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of views when people talk about apocalypse coming, the grid collapse, the failure of society, marauders, and all that other garbage. So what can a small and medium business owner do?
The first thing that you got to think about is conducting your risk assessment and developing a business continuity plan. Now, there are ISO standards that talk about a business continuity plan. We're not talking about that. Those are much more in depth.
We're talking about what can you do as a small and medium business owner to mitigate against the loss of power. It starts with your business impact analysis. It starts understanding critical functions that you need to be up and running. Prioritizing vulnerabilities, understanding what you need.
And so, for example, I use my business as a great example, is I need access to power. I need access to the internet. And I can get the internet through my home modem, or I can run the business on the cell network. I can also run it on satellite.
So what I've done is build different options in there. And a great case study is when you think about Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Now, it's a few years old, but that and Hurricane Katrina have had some significant research done against it. You know, over 8 million customers down, $8 billion in losses simply because of an inability to access the power grid.
Now, people can say, get a generator. Well, if you run a generator and you're running your home and you have a home office, like I do, and you're trying to generate all the power you need to run a normal home, and you have to do that for 14 days, 21 days, just think about the volume of fuel you're going to need to store. And it's not going out to get fuel, right? Because the fuel's not going to be available because your gas station is going to need a generator to get the fuel out of the ground.
So if you think your solution is to have a generator sitting to cover things, then you're going to have to have the gasoline already present at your house ready to go. Now, a lot of people may think that's good to go. When we talk in the reality of redundancies and building your backup plan for things that are critical in your business, think about what the minimum viable standard is. Now, this goes by a whole bunch of different names.
I call it your minimum power profile. And what I mean by that is what do you absolutely need at a minimum to keep your business operations going? What do you need that can't be replaced or can't be conducted without access to power? Right?
For example, is I run a computer. I have a full iMac. I have a bunch of other systems that I use printers and a but an office set up. Think of a normal office set up.
But really, when I think about it, I need my phone. I can record videos. I'm recording this now on an iPhone 14. And I have an external microphone, but I can use the microphone that's on the iPhone.
I can edit it and upload it through apps on the phone. Yes, it's a little bit more pain in the arse as we say in the east coast to edit when you're on a phone than it is a full computer. But I can do it on my phone. I can record my daily social media requirements.
If you look at the last two videos that I did talking about systems and goals, systems versus goals and setting that up, the minimum standard I need is I need my phone to be able to access the cell grid, the satellite network, or my home Wi-Fi. So I have all three. So I can obviously my home Wi-Fi. I have a home modem system.
I have a cellular data program. Unfortunately, here in Canada, we don't have true unlimited data. Like you get up to a certain gig level and then they dial you down to 3G, almost dial up standard. So we don't have a plan where you can buy unlimited amount of high speed data on your phone.
That doesn't exist in our country. But for some countries that does and then that's all you need, I also have the backup of accessing a friend's satellite internet. So one of those three only needs to be operational with my phone and that's the minimum conduct. So if I need my phone to be running 8 to 10 hours a day, which is the average usage for my business, how do I generate that power?
Now, I do it through the use of a Jacory 500. They're not cheap. Think about a dollar or what. I have had it for a long time and it's investment.
If you can't do that, think about different ways of generating backup power. And one of them I have here is my absolute favorite other than Jacory, is this is a simple battery power bank. Now, the difference with this power bank is it has a solar panel on it. Now, yes, it will recharge with this on in the solar panel.
You just have to be, shall we say, patient with the rate of recharging. But it has a couple of USB outlets. You see the lights there to tell you that's fully charged because having a power bank without being fully charged is kind of pointless. And so with that power bank alone, I can conduct two days worth of minimum standard operations for my business without needing anything else.
So I'm fully mobile. I don't need to be at home. I can run my business from literally anywhere on this planet that I can get access to the internet. And I can do that in North America through one of three ways.
I can do it internationally through other ways. I have satellite communication abilities as well that I access through an enrichment so I can be able to communicate with other parts of the world as necessary. So I've built the minimum redundancy. Now, it would be lovely to have all of the backup power to absolutely run everything in my house.
And some people have a considerable amount of money. They have house level generators or they have major generators that they use. But when you start to think about two, three weeks of power outage, you start to realize redundancies need to be fairly narrow, right? Fairly consistently available.
And so I use a Jackery 500 and I have two 100 watt solar panels. Now, I bought both the expensive folding one that comes with a Jackery. But I also bought the $100 one that's weighs like 30 pounds, but it just works. You lean it up against a fence outside, pointed at the sun, plug your Jackery into it.
And in a reasonably short period of time, your power, your battery is is recharged, right? It's not the most ideal situation. But for me, as long as it's sunny out and yes, I get the fact that it doesn't check or recharge very well in the rain in cloudy days. But literally, if I get a sunny day every three days or a partially sunny day every three days, I can run my business for a month off of that Jackery one solar panel and this iPhone.
I have two of these power banks with that. I can run for about 14 days before the cycle in the bat and it can't keep up with the draw with the time it takes to recharge it. Those are basic redundancy. So I can talk to my customers.
I can provide service. I can continue the services under the chief, the professional chief risk officer program. And I'll be able to upload YouTube videos to provide content that you appreciate. And I, you know, just take a quick break here in the middle of the podcast and the YouTube channel to just say thank you.
We're, we're, we're busting through 12, excuse me, 1200 subscribers. I appreciate it. I salute you. And for those that want to support the show, we're not monetized, fair enough.
Maybe we'll get there. Maybe we won't. But if you go to the link that is down in the YouTube description or on the podcast description, there's a button over to a program called Bynia Coffee, a brilliant bunch of humans. We've got a great episode coming up planned for how to start a business on the cheap and how to do it.
Excellent. And Bynia Coffee is central to that. You can buy us a coffee, $5 Canadian or a lot less American and just say thank you very much for the content that we produce. And I love simple black coffee.
Life is uncomplicated. So when you think about that, those are your first three things. To understand the world around you and to accept the fact that your small business is vulnerable and relies on a pieces of critical infrastructure that you have to understand and accept that. The second part of it is looking at your critical vulnerabilities.
What is the minimum standard that you need to have to run your business? Not the full on glorious. What can we do? But what's the minimum standard and then having redundancies?
And I want to give you a great example of this. And this is from Puerto Rico. Post Hurricane Maria, outages last up to 11 months. Think about that.
11 months without power. Unprepared businesses collapse. But in the Casa Pueblo community micro grid through that batteries and solar. Now they get more solar down in the Caribbean so you can understand this makes sense.
They were able to set up a local micro grid with 14 small businesses who were able to continue operations literally throughout that time frame. Supporting the local community by setting up a series of batteries and solar power not needing the external grid. Why I say that as an example is maybe you don't live in the area that gets that much sun. But it's about community.
It's about understanding I run a small home based business in Canada, in my city. Am I connected to people on my street? Am I connected to the local business network? Have I had conversations in my neighborhood about what does my world look like?
What does your world look like when you're on week two, week three of a power outage? Now my hair is a bit messy because I came in from snow shoveling and took off the Duke and I decided I would just leave it that way. We're in Canada. You know, we're I live we get somewhere between six to eight to nine feet of snow a year for a couple of weeks in February.
It might get down to minus 30 minus 35 degrees Celsius. That makes a whole bunch more challenging when you're trying to run a small business during power outages. So the fourth part is mobility and in the army light they teach you mobility is life right? Shoot move communicate.
Well, in small business operations, what happens if this structure around me is no longer available for use? And I like to say it that way because we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of what about a flood? What about an earthquake? What about a hurricane?
You can spend every day talking about and coming up with a disaster preparedness plan for every possible calamity. It makes no sense. There's only two things that you and your family and your small business can do. That's it.
It's a binary choice. You can shelter in place, which means stay and remain in your home, or you can evacuate to an alternate location. It doesn't matter what the cause is. Your decision is going to be the same.
If you're without power, you have two choices. Evacuate to an alternate location and we have a whole series of information in our roadmap to resilience that I spoke about both on the YouTube channel and throughout the podcast and on our sub stack. And we talk about the need for having an evacuation plan and what that looks like. But today I just want to focus on the fact that enabling remote work, not because everybody sits in their fat pants and watching Netflix when you're supposed to be moving the mouse around.
It's understanding that if you don't fix your business, if you can, because some businesses like an auto body shop or some type of major repair shop can't pick up and move, but parts of it can be mobile. Parts of it can be moved to an alternate location and set up there. So for example, could I run my business at my evacuation site? Yeah, absolutely I could, right?
Because my evacuation site is about 150 kilometers, just a little less than 100 miles away, and an alternate location of the friends. It's not some spooky off-grid place. It's just I understand as part of my evacuation plan that a friend of mine, the two of us, we have an agreement where my family can come to his basement and his family can come to my basement anytime for any reason and stay for a couple of weeks. So with that, when I evacuate, it's never a question of where I go.
I would never want to go to a public shelter. I'm not going to try to shelter in a hotel. I'm just going to his house. And we're far enough away that it's likely not guaranteed, but likely the same issue is not affecting both of us.
We're in two different climates, two different positions, etc. So that being said, I could pick up what did I say, the few minor things that are minimally acceptable standard that I need to keep my business running, I pick it up and I become mobile, right? I grab those pieces of my business that are necessary, my backup drive, my cell phone, the battery, a couple of records, maybe some pen and paper, and off I go, right? I can run it from anywhere, and then I can use his Wi-Fi to run the business.
And my customers might see a day or so of a blip during the transition, but generally the production of the content, the production of the client support, it'll all be out there and it'll all be running. So having the ability to do it elsewhere is great. Having the elsewhere chosen ahead of time is better, right? And again, it's no money.
We're not talking about investing in a second facility. We're not talking about having a second office site. It's having a conversation with other business owners. If you had to relocate and occupy a back office in somebody else's business, would you be willing to make that agreement and allow them the same reciprocal to yours?
Understanding it may be an inconvenience, yes, but it provides both of you a level of resiliency that you can't get without expending money to have an off-grid secondary location ready to occupy in the time of a disaster. Some businesses do that. Some businesses invest significant amount of money into that, etc. And so the key and the last part that I think is really important and is often missed in emergency preparedness ideas for businesses and for families is training.
And training doesn't mean shut the power off in your house and sit around for a week and see what the world looks like without any power. I think we can all imagine what that's like and you don't need to do that. Training means, can I take a day and run my business with the minimum standard that I think is what I need and practice it? I'm still delivering the content.
I'm still supporting clients. I'm still answering emails. I'm still delivering great things under our Chief, our fractional Chief Risk Officer program. And all of that is still getting out to the clientele, but I'm not using the full setup.
I'm using that micro piece, that minimum standard we talked about earlier in the show. And I'm actually practicing it. And the people around me that's supporting cast the two pluses that exist in every business, they're practicing as well. Does this work?
How hard is it to edit a YouTube video or how hard is it to conduct a client and build a proposal on my phone? Why not try it out and practice it when times are good? Instead of the first time you try to implement your emergency plan is when you have to implement your emergency plan. That doesn't make any logical sense.
But that for most businesses, that's what they do. Or the other pitfall that people get into is they create a training day. And it's a very well planned, very orchestrated one day event that people have had months to notice to practice for and to think about, it doesn't reflect any rapid onset early conditions. People go through it.
They make up a couple of blips. They're not really concerned because they know Monday morning, everything's back to normal. They have fun. They enjoy the donuts at the second location and they kick off.
And nobody is really learning the critical things that you need them to learn. And one of the best case studies for this is here in Canada in 2023, we had a spike. Now we've had a number of wildfires and the number of hectares burned in Canada has been going down steady for 30 years. But in 2023, we had a spike year.
We had a statistical outlier, which they periodically happen. And statistical outlier, I mean, we had a massive amount of wildfires and areas burned. Businesses that could pick up and move to new locations, some businesses had to evacuate once, twice, if not three times as the fires moved around, but they were able to keep up their operations and continue to provide services to their client and generate some form of revenue did very well. But a number of businesses who were fixed to a single location, when they evacuated, they didn't have a business evacuation plan.
They had a family evacuation plan, or they didn't. They just grabbed, grabbed, grabbed, and ran. But they didn't have a business evacuation plan. And if you're a small, medium business owner, and whether that's just an Etsy store, a print-on-demand, an auto body shop, a home graphic design shop, or like me, and you offer risk management services to small, medium businesses, whatever it may be, do you have a business emergency plan?
How do you intend to run your business when the power goes off at home? It's a very simple question. It takes no money to answer that. You've just got to go through the process that we outlined today.
As sit back and write it down, I'm pointing up here to my whiteboard. I'm a huge whiteboard fan. Sit down and write it on the whiteboard. What does my world look like for my business when the power goes out?
And you write that down. And then you walk through how you do your business, how your business made out. Now, if you follow our program that's available on our website through our courses on business continuity and risk management for small and medium businesses, there's a whole mapping exercise in there that we talk about how to map out business processes, how to map out your business, and all of your touch points for the internet employees, logistics, operations, reputation, that kind of thing. And then your strategic overlook.
When you have that visualization and humans are visual learners, we do things much better. And the potential for your emergency plan to work better is if you visualize it. So I visualize it on the whiteboard and using that system that's in that course that I talked about, you map it out and you say, what do each one of these touch points look like? How does this process in my business work when I don't have power?
If a lot of businesses is shuttered down. And for a day or two, again, a couple hundred bucks in loss revenue or profit life carries on disturbance is no big deal. But what if your power outage is out for a couple of weeks? What does your world look like that?
Is your plan to just stop doing business? Or would you like to continue operations during an extended power outage? And that's the point of today's discussion is just to lay it out for you to say, hey, there are questions you can ask. There are methods you can develop as a small and medium business owner to get your business ready.
So in the unfortunate event that the power goes out and it doesn't come on for several days or a week or two that you have prethought the strategy of what you're going to do, how you intend to roll out your business operations without access to power. How are you going to replicate it? Are you going to evacuate your business to a secondary location? What's the minimum standard?
What's the minimum level of power necessary? How you intend to generate it? And what's the minimum level of equipment that you would need to run your business? And for the vast majority of digital online businesses, my friends, it's your cell phone.
That's it. It's your cell phone and a power cord and a simple power bank and a set of headphones. It's that is. And I'm old school.
I prefer the wired headphones, right? I prefer to connect it to the wired headphones. They're much easier to use. Whatever.
It's a basic system. Everybody in today's world, you and your customers have some version of a smartphone. So you already have everything you need. You just got to figure out how do I power this throughout the disruption?
And then do I have the normal systems that may be on my computer? Can I replicate those on my cell phone to be able to run the business? It sounds really simple and it reasonably is. But through a lot of the research and surveys that I've done, it's quite astonishing the number of small businesses who don't think through what does their world look like when one of the systems they rely on is no longer available.
That's just not something people think about. And that's part of the education we're trying to provide here at Mastering Risk is to tell people the first part of preparedness and getting ready for the bad day is accepting responsibility for that outcome. It's in fact the most important question that we ask an emergency preparedness is, who is responsible for your outcomes? And if the answer is you, you're right.
And if the answer is anybody else, the government, anybody else, then you're wrong and you're setting yourself up for periods of significant pain and failure. Doesn't cost any money. It's free of charge. Take your time and walk through.
Figure it out. Lay the plan out. Drop your ideas down in the comments. We appreciate your support here at Mastering Risk.
A huge, happy new year. Let's make 2026 the year your small business, your side hustle, your little niche thing becomes a real world event, a going concern, and something that, hey, be with the rest of the 75% of businesses in North America. We make less than 100,000 a year. Be happy and joyful with a five figure income.
Because right now when I'm talking to you, I don't think many of you would be upset if you had an extra two or three grand to spend every month because of a side hustle. It's a pretty good deal. Alright, take care. Stay safe.
See you next time.