As the response to Hurricane Ike continues, all the employees of Schipul - The Web Marketing Company tip our collective hat to the first responders and volunteers who are working hard to help Houston regain its footing. Thank you so much for all you are doing for our community, our families and friends.

In the hours leading up to Ike's landfall, CEO Ed Schipul spent some time talking about crisis preparation with the Houston Chronicle's L.M. Sixel. With responsibility for maintaining the Web presence of a number of important community assets, such as the Houston Chapter of the American Red Cross and Reliant Park among others, Schipul takes business continuity and disaster preparedness very seriously.

The article that resulted from the discussion, "Workers play a variety of roles during a storm," describes Schipul's approach to disaster preparedness:

At Schipul, a Houston-based Web services provider whose clients include the Houston Red Cross and Reliant Park, founder and CEO Ed Schipul has to keep the computers working and asked for five volunteers.

They definitely have a sense of pride, said Schipul. And when it comes time to consider promotions, their extra effort will be recognized.

But who is on deck during the hurricane doesn't necessarily mean they're the most essential, said Schipul.

"Technically, I'm a non-essential person," said Schipul, who was hunkered down in his office Friday. But he's got his network administrator there just in case servers go down.

And the programmers, while reachable remotely, aren't in the office. The very fact they're good makes them non-essential in a storm because they've written the programs well, he said.

Read the entire article here. After the Chronicle interview, Ed expanded on what he considers to be the fundamentals of cultivating a team that can be counted upon to keep the business operational through even the worst of circumstances:

1. Hire good people, train the heck out of them, and let them run – this means that perhaps even the upper management is “non essential.”
2. "Essential" is defined by only one thing and that is your crisis response plan. Be prepared, and pick the team that can respond to unexpected consequences.
3. Work hard to eliminate or at least minimize inefficiencies and duplicative work by doing work "once for all time for all users." By doing this, a good employee, depending on their job responsibility may not be needed in a crisis either.
4. Leaders must work themselves out of a job.
5. At Schipul, the emergency response team overlaps the “essential” employees who respond in a crisis.
6. The emergency response team, and volunteering for a position that is critical in a crisis is DEFINITELY a way to differentiate yourself and receive higher pay and/or promotions in the future.

Schipul will be conducting an after-incident assessment to determine what aspects of the crisis response worked well and what can be improved. All of this is intended to ensure the safety of our employees and their families, to eliminate or minimize downtime for our clients, and to provide clients the excellent customer service they deserve and expect.