Hannah, Gustav, Ike, Chicken Little, and The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’

We’re mid-way through the 5th Annual National Preparedness month and the 2008 Hurricane Season is starting to reach maturity. Living in South Florida puts you in a heightened sense of awareness around storm season. So far this year we have been very fortunate; but I have been following the news around the last few named storms and just this morning on the news they were saying that 20,000 people did not evacuate Galveston, TX even though the language of the evacuation order said, ‘Leave or face certain death.’

I also watched reports of Ike making landfall in Texas and a rain drenched reporter was showing a street full of businesses and pointing out that only about 1 in 15 had boarded up their windows.

It’s that fundamental human impulse that says, ‘I’ll play the odds’ or ‘it won’t happen to ME’ that leads some people to defy these types of warnings and shirk common sense preparation. Unfortunately,  it happens to people just like YOU and the annoyance of something as mundane as boarding up some windows can mean the difference between a storm being an inconvenience and a catastrophe. Read more

Happy Holidays from The Anywhere Office – a musical gift!

We’d like to take a moment to wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season and the very best for the coming year.

Please enjoy a musical gift from us . . . a special holiday doo-wop song from our good friends Sha-Boom (just click the play button at the bottom of this post – or download the mp3 to your computer).

You can also view our online Holiday Card to you which includes some fun holiday videos!

We really appreciate you being a subscriber to The Anywhere Office and downloading our free virtual office and virtual team resources! We’re fired up about some new webcasts, eBooks, and other surprises we have planned for 2008! Be sure to keep visiting this blog to stay updated and share your comments and thoughts.

We hope you enjoy this time with family and friends and look forward to an exciting and prosperous new year.

With warmest regards,
Phil & Jason Montero

Here is a photo of myself and Jason sitting on Santa’s lap as kids – poor Santa!

Our Holiday Gift to you . . . This Doo-Wop Christmas song from Sha-Boom:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:33 — 0.0KB)

Free Business Continuity Teleseminar for National Preparedness Month

This September marks National Preparedness Month 2007, a nationwide coordinated effort encouraging families to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses, and schools. During National Preparedness Month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working with a wide variety of organizations to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote community involvement across the nation through various events and activities.

This year each week of National Preparedness Month has a different focus. The second week of National Preparedness Month (September 9 – 15) focuses on business preparedness.

During this week ourselves and several other National Preparedness Month Coalition Members are hosting events and activities to help businesses get prepared. We invite you to take this opportunity to listen to a FREE hour long Audio Seminar we are offering called Riding the Storm Out: don’t wait until it’s too late to form a business continuity plan. We hosted this teleseminar and recorded it live during National Preparedness Month 2006 and features a panel of 4 small business experts discussing tools, strategies, and best practices relating to Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness.

Beginning with National Preparedness Month and continuing until the end of this year, this hour-long seminar can be listened to on-line, on demand – or downloaded; there are also downloadable handouts and resources provided by each panelist.

For more information about National Preparedness Month visit http://www.ready.gov/america/npm07/

Free Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness Teleseminar

Well it’s July and that means hurricane season in Florida, which is where we call home. The season lasts from June all the way through November (it’s not all paradise here in the land of Palm Trees!). For people living and doing business in Florida, hurricane season is an annual reminder of the importance of business continuity planning and disaster preparedness. No named storms made landfall here last season, but the two years before that caused catastrophic damage and derailed many businesses beyond just South Florida. Currently, a big concern for assistance organizations and authorities in Florida is that people suffer from what they call ‘hurricane amnesia”… in other words, because we went a season without any major storms, folks get complacent and aren’t as diligent about making sure they have supplies and a plan. Well, that’s true of business owners and managers just the same. So remember, the best time to prepare for any emergency is before it happens, and that’s not just true for South Floridians, there are many types of possible business disruptions or emergencies regardless of where you live and work.

Last year we got together a small panel of South Florida experts to discuss best practices, strategies, and tools related to business continuity, disaster recovery planning, and continuity of operations; we offered a free teleseminar in the interest of helping people figure out where to start and what they could do to protect themselves, even on a tight budget. The session went excellently and we not only participated in the presentation, we learned a great deal. We have decided to make an audio recording and the handouts from the teleseminar available for free download throughout the rest of this hurricane season.

Here’s a link to the audio and handouts for our free one-hour teleseminar “Riding the Storm Out”. In this teleseminar we discuss developing a solid disaster preparedness plan, choosing the right communication technology, as well as how to use home offices, virtual offices, and virtual teams to help ensure your business is ready to weather any storm (or interruption).

Make sure your business is prepared and listen in to this valuable audio program today!

A panelist at the NICSA convention discussing the changing workplace and virtual teams

I arrived at the beautiful Doral Resort in Miami today (only a few hours South on the Florida Turnpike for me). It was a beautiful day in the mid 60’s and the sun was shining, so I really enjoyed the drive. I felt guilty guilty for a second getting ready this morning and watching the weather channel when I saw that it was -10 degrees with the wind chill in Boston today (the place I called home before moving to Florida). But only for a second . . . 😉

I’m speaking on a panel tomorrow at the annual NICSA convention. Our session is called Looking Forward/Looking Back: Changing Demographics in the Workplace of the 21st Century.

Our panel (which lasts an hour) will be discussing:

• How to get the best candidates
• How to integrate part-time and remote employees into the culture
• How do alternative work arrangements impact the bottom line in terms of cost savings and increased productivity?

I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion. I’ll post more on Wednesday with more info on how the panel went and a summary of best practices and lessons learned.

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