Today's Guest

Patrick Hardy is the founder and CEO of Hytropy Disaster Management™, the largest full-service small business and family disaster management company in the US. He leverages his decades of experience to empower large companies, small businesses, families, event planners, and more in the face of any emergency. Patrick is a Certified Emergency Manager®, a Certified Risk Manager®, and a FEMA Master of Exercise®. Patrick has been published or featured in dozens of industry journals, periodicals, and popular media outlets such as Today, Parade Magazine, Yahoo!, and Good Morning America. Listen to Patrick to learn more about why he believes disaster planning is key to a strong business foundation.

Resources Shared

• Hytropy Disaster Management
• Design Any Disaster by Patrick Hardy
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street. We all like to think about the positive side of things, what we'll do if things go well. But our guest today spends his time thinking about what to do when things go wrong. And I suggest it's worth your time to listen, because if we've learned anything in the past few years between COVID-19 floods, hurricanes, wars, cyber attacks, not to mention inflation, supply chain shortages and imminent recession, it's that things unfortunately do go wrong. Patrick Hardy, our guest is the founder and CEO of Hytropy Disaster Management, the largest full service disaster management company in the United States, and is the single most innovative and accomplished disaster planning expert in his field, and we think in the world. He's also the author of Design Any Disaster, an interesting new book which he will talk about on the show.

Patrick leverages his decades of experience to empower large companies, small businesses, families, event planners, and more in the face of any emergency. He strongly believes the only way to deliver optimal service is to discover what your business is all about and who you are as a business owner, arm of that information, he'll deliver premier emergency preparedness service no matter how big or small your business is. No matter what sort of small business you run, bar, nursing home, RV Park school, whatever, Patrick will leverage every bit of his expertise to take care of everything you need. What should listeners get out of this episode? Well, obviously whatever your line of work, it's a good idea to take a look at the potential downside as well as the upside listening to Patrick Hardy as a reminder that worrying about emergency preparedness is like buying insurance. You don't want to do it, but it's a good idea to do so. This show, as always brought, to you by Thryv. Small business runs better on Thryv. Patrick, with that, welcome to the show.

Patrick Hardy:

Gordon. Thank you very much for having me. And I have to tell you that in all the different shows that I've been on, you are the very, very first one to actually talk about things like supply chain disruptions and inflation. Because normally, people, when they introduce me to talk about hurricanes and earthquakes and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. And you were the very first one to discuss it because you're absolutely right. When you're looking at small businesses, you're looking at a diversity of things that could easily disrupt their operation. That was a really interesting observation at the beginning. Kudos to you, my friend.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. Well, thanks for that. It has been a crazy few years in the world of small business, more than a few years. And so, this conversation I think as well, [inaudible 00:03:37]. First, tell us how you got started in this very interesting business of disaster preparedness.

Patrick Hardy:

Well, it started when I was in high school. And I was a high school swimmer and nobody, I mean, nobody wanted to swim the 500, the 1000 and the mile, because those are really long distances have to swim. It's 33 laps, 66 laps and so forth. And I was on the volunteer. And so, at the end of the time for the swim season, a bunch of the people who were on the swim team decided we're going to be become lifeguards. Because I swam these long distances, what you had to do is you had to swim across a lake. You had to swim from one beach on the lake to the other side of the lake, and I did the best of everybody, and all these people were so much better and faster than I was in sprinting. And from there, at the end of the lifeguarding season, a bunch of people said, "We're going to become EMTs," and so forth and so forth.

And I went to college and when I was graduating, I actually studied political science. And when I graduated, I noticed something. I noticed that every one of the graduates that I was with, they had some kind of goal they were shooting for, either was the elimination of nuclear weapons, or they were trying to solve world hunger, or they were trying to prevent climate change. Something, and I didn't have anything. And so, that was right around the time of Hurricane Katrina. And I decided at that point, I said, "That's something that I think is solvable in our lifetime if we get some fresh thinking," because the most powerful superpower in the world still has trouble navigating and negotiating significant geopolitical disasters. I said, "I'm going to focus on that's."

So I wrote a letter to the governor of Louisiana and ended up getting a job. And I worked in Louisiana for a number of years, and then I went to Europe. I studied in Europe. I studied European disaster management. And while I was there, they had a contest and they said this was open to any student, graduate student, undergraduate student, and it was a business competition. And they said whoever had the best business idea would get some seed money to start a business. And I thought, "I'm not a business person, but I'll give it a shot." I created a business plan and it was all around preparing small business, because I went and I made it to the very final round. And the last part of the final round was an elevator pitch, a five-minute elevator pitch to three millionaires, in what we call Shark Tank. In Britain it's called Dragons Den.

And so, they asked you questions just like you see on the TV show, and I told them, I said, "There is considered solutions for large businesses. There are considered solutions for governments. There's no solution whatsoever for preparing small businesses for disasters of any kind, and that's what I want to solve." And so, when I did that, I won some seed money. I got the equivalent of about $15,000, and lo and behold, I opened a business and now I work with small businesses from coast to coast with lot of stuff. As you were talking about in the beginning, I work with RV parks and nursing homes and alligator farms. Yes, an alligator farm just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I work with some incredible businesses, underwater cable operations. I didn't know that was a business. But it's just amazing to me how the entrepreneurial spirit in America is so creative, that people can seemingly find any way to make a living, and that is something I'm extremely proud of in the way that we try to protect their operations.

Gordon Henry:

We have, as you said, listeners in diverse fields, and I want to get into really what you do and what the programs look like so that eventually maybe somebody can call you and become a client. But just for listeners, just top line one, two, three, what are the top tips for people who've never really thought about disaster preparedness? What are maybe the three things you tell people, "This is what you got to be thinking about as you prepare for what you might do"?

Patrick Hardy:

The first thing I want people to do is I want you to eliminate the word disaster from your vocabulary. I want you to eliminate it entirely, and I want to replace it with a better word. Disruption. Because when you think about disruptions, it then changes your mindset to thinking that what I'm focused on here is getting over a challenge. Because as small business owners, and I'm a small business owner, we deal with all kinds of challenges, whether they're accounting challenges, or they're operational challenges, or they're managerial challenges. Whatever they are, it's our job to overcome them, because we have no one else but ourselves. And I'm a service-based business. One of the things that I have to, and I'm responsible for is ensuring that every part of my operations gets over any challenge it happens to face. And so, when you look at something like a hurricane, when you look at something like an earthquake, when you look at something even like inflation, and in fact, I actually work with a... Don't ask me how this happened, Gordon, I don't know how it happened. I have no clue whatsoever.

I actually work, believe it or not, with a salon owner. There's a hair salon in the country of Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe, the biggest challenge they face is inflation because they have 2000% inflation. That is a massive, massive correction. And so, when I look and I work with businesses like that, I say, "This is a disruption. We're going to have to change things." And actually, what we ended up doing was we changed it so that they ran entirely cashless. They're now a barter based company. I mean, that's the only thing that retains value. One of the things that I tell business owners, I say, "I want you to take the word disaster out, because the only one who can create a disaster is you. An 8.0 earthquake is not a disaster. It's only a disaster if you let it become one. If instead, you look at it as a disruption, then it can actually allow you to overcome it."

The second thing I tell people after I talk about that elimination of the word disaster is I say, "I want you to change your mindset, to, "If I do nothing, no one else will do anything either."" And I tell people that, and I reinforce it in my book a lot. Because one of the things I tell people is I say, when business owners get into trouble, when they truly begin to fall backwards and then they really experience a problem, is when they expect someone or something else to do it for them. When they expect the government to give them money. When they expect the SBA to give them interest free loans for as long as possible. When they expect somebody in a uniform and a badge to take care of it for them, or when they ask the insurance company to do everything.

That's one of the biggest challenges is that people turn to insurance companies and say, "You're going to recover me, right? And the insurance company goes, "No, I'm just going to hand you a check," and it's not even probably going to be for the amount that you think you're going to get. I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard that. I'm sure you have too, Gordon and all your time working with small businesses. I tell them, is the assumption I want you to make with all those outside people is I want you to assume they're like ice cream. Nice, but not necessary. And so, you take the assumption that if I do nothing, no one else is going to do anything either, it maintains that entrepreneurial spirit that we had going into opening a small business, because opening a small business businesses a risk.

But when you take it and you actually say, "No matter what the disruption is, I can handle it." That fundamentally changes the actions that you are going to perform in that disruption. The third thing that I tell every small business owner after I tell them to eliminate disasters out of their vocabulary, after I tell them, "You need to change your mindset to if I do nothing, no one else will either." The third thing I tell them is, "Taking those first two things into consideration, I want you to realize that every disruption is an opportunity for you to get stronger and better." You do not have to be weaker as a result of a category five hurricane. You do not have to be weaker after a massive bout of inflation. You do not have to be weaker after you lose a lawsuit. You do not have to be weaker.

But what I challenge you to do is you have to focus on it and say, "How can I turn this into a success?" Because one of the wonderful things about being a small business owner and you know this too Gordon, you've seen this with businesses many times, we're nimble. We have that over our larger competitors. We can quickly change and pivot, and it's that agility that I want people to take into consideration when they're applying and looking at different elements of overcoming any kind of disruption that they may happen to face, whether they're in Florida, California or otherwise.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific explanation. Your points make me think about something I've seen over the years, we've seen over the years at Thryv with our clients, which is that as much as none of us wishes to have a disaster, natural or otherwise, God forbid, there often is a silver lining in the sense of for many businesses after the disruption or disaster, there is a huge demand for new services or remedial services. For example, we've seen when these hurricanes do come and a lot of houses or other infrastructure gets destroyed, there's a demand, suddenly, for construction and renovation and remediation that often because lots of money is flowing in, whether it's from the government or insurance or otherwise. And so, these companies that provide those services see a boom actually. And let's look at COVID. As COVID is thankfully waned now, areas like doctors and dentists see people flooding in because they put off getting treatment in so many areas. Often, while there are bad things that happen, there is also a boom afterwards. And you should be thinking about that, that while maybe you will suffer temporarily, there sometimes is a big opportunity that follows.

Patrick Hardy:

Absolutely. And one of the things that I say to business owners all the time, regardless of the size of the disruption or whatever that has happened, I turn to them and I say, "Hold on, take a breath and this is what I want you to do. Because you've looked at the destruction, you've looked at the things that this has destroyed. Now I want you to look at, what has it revealed? What has this disruption revealed for you? What opportunities have now suddenly opened up?"

One of the stories, as a matter of fact, I end on this story in my book. I talk about an entrepreneur from Italy who was in San Francisco during the earthquake in 1906. And one of the things what he did was, he had a bank called the Bank of Italy. It was a little bank, he served just the local area. Then the earthquake happened and all the other banks were closed. And what he did was he instructed his employees who showed up to work to pull out the safe, and he literally pulled the safe out onto the street. He opened the safe up and he took a table, a pen, and he took a ledger sheet out. And anyone who asked for a loan, he gave it to them. No credit check, no Equifax, no nothing. He did it by a handshake.

And by doing so, he issued out loans to everyone in the community. And by doing so, they were able to recover without becoming ultimately dependent because he was the one that said, "I'm your community bank and I'm going to work with you." And that entrepreneur's name was APG Anini and we now know him as the founder of Bank of America. And that Bank of Italy became Bank of America on the backs of a story like that.

One of the things I did during the BP oil spill, I was working with a number of companies. I actually had a contract. I actually worked the spill, but my company was still working with small businesses. One of the small businesses I worked with was a wedding photography business in Alabama. And they were going to go out of business because all the beaches were covered in tar and they were dealing with all kinds of mercy response. What we did was I pivoted them and I said, "Let's look at not the fact that there's no more weddings." What do you suddenly have? You have beaches filled with people who need to have pictures taken both for insurance issues and because reporters are asking for it. You have access to that.

We got them contracts so that they could actually take pictures of workers and they would sell them to Associated Press, to Reuters, to Getty, to all these different... And I said, "If you're able to pivot, you can change that. But it requires a mindset shift." And the mindset shift is exactly what you identified. Not even just the silver lining. It's saying, "Let's look at the dark cloud and say, "What is that dark cloud now revealed to me?"" The dark cloud now says, "Gee, now it's going to rain. Maybe I can offer umbrellas." These are different things that you can offer, but you have to look at it and say, "Not what the disaster has destroyed, but what has that disaster now revealed to me that gives me an advantage?"

One of the things you know talked about was the fact that money flows into disaster zones all the time. You are absolutely correct, and I tell business owners all the time, "You have an advantage over larger companies because you can get contracts with the local emergency management agencies. But if you do no planning, if you don't think through what's going to happen in advance, if you don't truly make a commitment to it in advance, they're not going to take you seriously." And I know this, I work with thousands of jurisdictions. If they think that you are just trying to make a quick buck and you're not committed to true preparedness to being there in the community, they're not going to provide you with any money, because you and I have heard tons of stories of small business owners who sometimes they're well-meaning, sometimes not and they take money and then they simply don't realize what they're being asked to do and they don't have the commitment or the ability to be able to fulfill their commitments.

And I think a lot of jurisdictions have gotten burned over the years. What I tell people is, "If you're prepared and you're committed, then you can make a massive difference in your community," regardless of whatever it may have faced.

Gordon Henry:

Your comment about the Bank of America and others made me just think about during COVID, which is so fresh in our minds. At first, of course, it was dark days for everybody that first March where everybody's like, "What's going to happen? Is the world coming to an end?" But once you got past that, we saw so many businesses that were clever about turning it into an opportunity. For example, the home service businesses quickly realized people are home. They're looking at their walls, the paint peeling, the roof leaking. They have money that they're not spending on travel. And there was this big demand for home services and many companies that did those pool installation that boomed during COVID, who probably didn't expect it to be a great thing for them, but for many it frankly was.

And even things like restaurants, which of course suffered tremendously. Those that got into touchless delivery, curbside pickup there. People still needed to eat, you just had to do it in a different way. You couldn't expect them to come in and sit down to a fine dining. But there were other ways that people had demand. Again, opportunity out of what appears to be often adversity.

I'd love to talk about your offering, your business and how you help small businesses. I noticed you have, I guess on your website, it talks about a five-step small business disaster program. Step one, select your industry. Step two, get ready to use plans. Step three, select threat plans. Step four, emergency supplies. Step five, checkout. How does a small business actually work with you? What does it look like?

Patrick Hardy:

Well, we are the only full service small business disaster company in the world. We are the only one. We are exclusive to small business. And as you can see, we work in 57 industries. I work with a RV park in Yosemite. I work with a nursing home that's located on an island in North Carolina. I work with all kinds of business, all kinds of places. And one of the things that we do is on the website is I try to make it really simple with folks. I just say, "You go in there, you select a few things," and we actually use a different model. In fact, our website's going to be changing. We're going through a massive rebranding. We are so excited about it, and we're going to relaunch on September 1st, because we are going into a full subscription model where people will essentially pay... What they do is they will pay us an annual fee and you can get access to all the plans you want. Hurricane, earthquake, alien invasion, whatever you want. And you'll get access to that.

And if you would like us to customize it for you, you'll just pay a small fee. And I have one of my emergency planners, I have emergency planners who are experts in these industries, and they will work with you. And what you'll do is you'll fill out a couple questionnaires and you'll give us some documents, and we will customize those documents for you. We pretty much write two different kinds of disaster plans. We write what we call administrative plans, and the others are operational plans. And sometimes people ask me what the difference is between them and I say, "I want you to think about it like a decorative towel versus a towel you would use on a daily basis." You would never, after you jumped out of the shower, you would never try to wipe yourself down with a decorative towel.

I've tried it, but when I was 15, when I forgot to put my towel back and I took one of my mother's decorative towels and I thought, "Ah, she's never going to find out." And I tried to wipe myself down and you don't realize that there is synthetic fibers on there so that it's waterproof. Basically all you're doing is pushing the water. It doesn't actually absorb anything, because the decorative towel's meant to be in there.

The decorative towel plan, that is the plan that goes to insurance companies. If you are in a regulated industry, as I said, when you're in healthcare, you're required by law to have a disaster plan. Also, if you're in education, I work with a lot of charter schools, if you're in petrochemical, et cetera, et cetera, those are the plans that go to boards of directors. They have long paragraphs, legal stuff, the whole thing, and we write all that for you.

The operational plan is different. That operational plan is written in eighth grade language. It is in blocks. We make it so that it's step one, step two, step three. We make it so simple for businesses because we've been refining this for 14 years and we are so proud of the plans that we have devoted. In fact, the plans that we now use in the modular community, just to get to give an example, modular mobile home parks, the plan that we developed is now considered the standard plan internationally. Because we believe that modular communities are places where people need to have access to plans all the time, because that's where they live. We make sure that we make the plans so that they're easy to read, we give clear binders and we find that people love that stuff.

The other kind of things that we do, people hire us to do training. And in fact, one of the things I'm going to be doing in the fall, and Gordon, I hope I can come back at some point, because in the fall we're doing something really amazing and I'm going to talk to you about it in a minute. But with training, we travel all over the place and even if we haven't written your plan, we'll actually train your staff on how to think about the plan. How do you activate this thing? What do you really have to know? And we make it so that it's not doom and gloom, it's not chicken little. We make it so it's so easy to use.

Then the third thing we do is what we call drilling. And everyone knows what I'm talking about. Fire drills, right? No. Much beyond fire drills. We do real disaster drills. And Gordon, I'll tell you, in the fall, we're doing something incredible. On October 19th at 10:19 AM, we are going to be at a high school in Silicon Valley and we are running the largest school disaster drill anywhere in the United States. And the reason why it's so large is because I have a really special element that I am adding to it. It's this. The participants from the school, so all the school participants, there will be no adults. The students will run the entire disaster response.

And I have people coming from the outside. I've got fire, I've got law enforcement, I've got FEMA, I've got the Red Cross, I've got all kinds of organizations coming, but the students are going to be in charge. And I do that because I want to show people that disasters don't have to be this grand enigma. They can be things that anyone can take care of. That's why I called my book Design Any Disaster, because you design it. You design the way you want to have it, or you can design it away, you can design it away entirely. And that's what we train our clients to do is we say, "You're a small business, you don't have a lot of time to be down. You can't be down. If you have a cyber attack, you can't be down for two weeks." Because studies have shown if you are down for two weeks, there's an 80% chance that you will be out of business in five years. And that's not exaggerated statistic. The Disaster Recovery Institute ran a really famous study on this. They've done subsequent studies.

I tell small business owners, "Let's converse and get you back." Even like you said, if during COVID, if that means your primary way that you were working with customers. In other words, so let's say you were a restaurant, you were doing fine dining. We have COVID now. You can't have people in the restaurant. Where can we continue to serve food? We can take it out to [inaudible 00:25:55]. Does it require pivoting? Absolutely. But the first thing it requires us to think of is, how do we look at the disaster not as something that's going to hold us back, but what opportunity is it now open to us? Because now people may want to have us have them dining at home all the time.

Which one of the things that we've discovered, have discovered this with a lot of people is that they actually like having the restaurant come to them versus them having having to go back out. Uber Eats and these other ones have made a lot of money doing that. When I work with small businesses, those are the kinds of strategies that we've developed. We want these services to be affordable. We make them only a few hundred dollars a year and we just say, "We are your team. We are your disaster team. We are the people who are there for you when you need us. And we provide you with whatever you need to get you back in business, regardless of the industry you're in."

Gordon Henry:

I did want to ask you about cost. And you touched on it briefly there. Obviously, small businesses are often on a tight budget. It sounds like you have customers ranging from very small to some that are quite large. If somebody's just getting started and they're on a tight budget they could actually work with, you get a plan in place, maybe run a drill for a few hundred dollars a year, that's a possibility?

Patrick Hardy:

Absolutely. No question about it. In fact, one of the things that we are actually encouraging small business owners to do, and anyone who is listening, we extend send this to you also, which is I'm going to be going on a national tour. We're going to be doing lots of drills in promotion of my book. And so, actually at that point, one of the things you're going to do is you don't only have to pay me, you can actually buy a few copies of the book, which you can then give out to customers or you can resell. And I will come and do a drill there, and it'll be the most fun and innovative drill. It'll be something that not only is about dealing with a disruption or something, dealing with whatever you're facing, but it actually goes farther than that. It actually says, "How can I turn your workforce into a group of people who are now a cohesive team, when things are chaotic, when there is a crisis?"

Because that is when businesses get in trouble, is when people say, "I'm not empowered enough." And that empowerment message is the one that I talk about all the time. Because I want small businesses all over the country to be prepared for disruptions of any type because those are the kinds of challenges that if they turn correctly, they can be incredible successes. And you talked about a few of them. During COVID, the ones who were able to convert and pivot not just in the restaurant industry, but I can think of other ones in the medical industry, in other ones, in the events industry. They were the ones that were successful and they're the ones that are going to continue to thrive.

Yeah, we charge. And for other small businesses, ones that are in the regulated industries, we only charge a few hundred dollars a year because we want you to have customized plans, and we stick with you throughout the process. If you're in a regulated industry, we submit the plans with you to the state or to the insurance company, whatever. And it doesn't matter, unlimited number of changes. Whatever changes they ask you to make, we will make them no matter what. We stick through all the way to make sure you are compliant.

Gordon Henry:

Great stuff. We'll be back in just 30 seconds with Patrick Hardy. Talk about how Patrick can help your business get ready for the next disaster after the break. Don't go anywhere.

Thryv:

This episode of Winning on Main Street is brought to you by Thryv, the small business management platform that you and your customers will love. No matter where you are, Thryv helps you run your business, keep organized, and get paid faster, all from one login and dashboard. Thryv makes it easy for customers to find you online, instantly interact and stay engaged. And with free unlimited support 24/7, there really is no comparison. Go to thryv.com/pod for a quick demo to see everything Thryv can do.

Gordon Henry:

And we're back with Patrick Hardy talking about disaster preparedness. Patrick's got a new book out and he's telling us about interesting stories about how you, as a small business person, could turn this adversity into opportunity. Good way to look at things, because eventually something bad will happen, just listen to the news. Patrick, it seems to me, just thinking about any of these things we've been talking about, hurricanes probably comes to mind, cyber attacks. People seem to always be surprised by these things happening. And yet, if you live in the southeast, these hurricanes just happen. And if it's not one year, it's the next. Why are people constantly surprised and why aren't they better prepared?

Patrick Hardy:

When I first started working in Florida, I had a first few clients. I'll never forget a client. I went down there and I was saying to them, and they were actually part of a larger company. This is actually a construction business, and they had a construction site. And so, I went to the floor men and I was talking to them about disaster preparedness during a hurricane. And so, I was relaying everything the national office told me to. They said, "You need to evacuate if it's a category this or a category that." And they just stared at me blankly. They just stared and they said... And so, I finished my narrative. They were very polite and then they said, "Young man, where are you from?" I said, "I'm from California." And they all started laughing. The entire workforces were laughing and laughing and laughing, laughing.

And they said, "Young man, there's something you need to know about Florida. I've lived in Florida my entire life. I don't even stop mowing my lawn unless it's a category three or higher. I'm not evacuating if it's a category two." Now, even though the national corporation had instructed them to leave in a category one or two, they said they weren't going to because they thought, "Well, I understand hurricanes." And one of the things that happened in 2018 was very interesting. Hurricane Michael was off the coast of Florida, was a cat two. It became a cat four very rapidly. I think it was just only a few hours, and it caught everyone off guard.

And so, one of the things, and I talk about this in my book extensively, is I say, "Look, you need to treat every single hurricane like it is unique, like you've never been in one before, because they always act and behave very differently." Hurricane Andrew was an incredibly compact, incredibly compact storm. It was like a tornado that went through Florida and that was in 1993. And it just barreled through the state. Then you look at Hurricane Katrina, which was a massive storm, but then it dissipated very rapidly, where hurricane Andrew did not really dissipate for a while. It crossed the state and it was a pretty strong storm because although it was smaller, it was really strong.

One of the things I tell Floridians all the time without insulting their diligence is I say, "Look, I've been through a few of them now," and I said, "I know what hurricanes are about also. I was in Hurricane Sandy, I was in Hurricane Gustav, I've been in a few of these." It's okay for you to say I have some knowledge and background of hurricanes. But when people get in trouble is when they say this. "I know hurricanes. I know how they behave. I know what's going to happen." Let's pretend that's true. Let's pretend you absolutely know how every hurricane is going to behave. You don't know how the infrastructure is going to behave, because really all a hurricane is a massive storm. It's rain, it's wind, it's just extreme winds and a lot of rain.

But the infrastructure is really what the impact is. When the bridges are out, when the roads are flooded, when people are on the streets, when you can't get to the grocery store. I tell people, "You may not understand that, but you understand that it's your dependencies." That's what turns this from a disruption to a disaster, because it's just a rainstorm if you are already prepared and you know what you're going to do and you know how you're going to pivot. But when you let the storm overwhelm you and you let the infrastructure around you now dictate and close your options off, now you have a real disaster because you can't pivot, you can't. You don't have the time.

Or you've allowed the events around you to control you. Therefore, you have essentially said, "That's okay if I do nothing. The infrastructure will be there no matter what." That's like an implied way of saying, "If I do nothing, that's okay. Someone else will handle it for me." If instead you took the attitude, "We're going to have a big storm, I'm not going to assume that that bridge is going to work, because I have no control over that bridge. I don't know how good that bridge is. I don't know if it's crumbling, I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know what its rating is. But I'm going to manage my options so that there is no way I'm going to allow this to turn into a disruptive activity, and instead I'm going to turn it into something that leaves me enough options open where I can pivot." But that's when people tend to get in trouble.

The other smaller instance, too, is when people do things that are incredibly dangerous, things that they think are safe, are that are not. And the most obvious example of all time is people driving through floodwaters. It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to do that even though the weather service... And these are people who are in Florida, these are weather people. They know the weather, they know weather better than you or I or Hurricane Floridians will ever know it. And they say that is the most dangerous activity imaginable because you have no idea how strong that current is. You really don't know how deep it is. And lo and behold, after every storm, Gordon, you and I see it on CNN or you see it on TV all the time. Time after time, you see people going out of helicopters because there's people standing on their cars, because the river that they thought they understood, they lived there their whole life, all of a sudden the infrastructure wasn't there, wasn't strong enough, and they immediately got overwhelmed.

Gordon Henry:

Patrick, we're almost out of time, but I want to make sure, first of all, people know where to find you and learn more about how they can potentially become a client of yours, get this valuable information for their business specifically. Tell us about that. And then I also want to finish talking about your book. Where do people find you?

Patrick Hardy:

The website we have is reversedisaster.com. That's the website. And for those of you who decide to go on there, you will see a massive change on September 1st as well. But right now, we work with all industries. We work with any kind of budget because the main goal, when I started this, when I stood in front of those dragons in Great Britain, I turned to them and said, "Small businesses with five employees or fewer, they have no solutions." There was no one here. And so, what I'm offering is an opportunity for us to work with the smallest micro businesses in the world, and that's what I want to be able to do. We would love to work with you. Please go on there and start a conversation with us. We would love to talk with you. I have experts in your field, people who know exactly what you are going through, because we want this to be something that is part of your daily business operations, something that you use just as much as maybe you use Thryv or as much as you use something else within your operational sphere.

Gordon Henry:

Fantastic. And then finally on your new book, it's Design Any Disaster, available on Amazon or probably wherever books are sold. You can see it if you're looking at the video right now, Design Any Disaster. And is that geared towards a one, two, three, step-by-step help book for small businesses? Who's your intended audience?

Patrick Hardy:

The intended audience is for anyone. This is for families, this is for small businesses, this is even for people who work for big companies, because I am trying to get you to get a mindset shift. But I will tell you, the book is placed in chronological order. We start with ready, which is, it's the portion of you're getting disaster plans, you're looking at equipment, and I talk about some fascinating things. You are going to learn some really important stuff. Even if you have, "I have thousands of dollars worth of emergency equip equipment," I'm going to force you to think differently about that equipment. Everything from your generators to that red backpack you bought at the big box store.

Then I talk about reacting. How are you going to react in a disaster? That's the moment that something happens, the moment something occurs. How are you supposed to do it? And I'll give you guys an interesting hint. Do not ever be calm. Don't ever be calm. And I explained why, because being calm is one of the worst things you could possibly do in a disaster. I'm going to challenge you. Read that chapter and you will love it. I talk about drills in there. Then we talk about the response phase. I talk about evacuating, sheltering in place, locking down. Those are not the same things. I talk about how to prepare your property, whether you're a small business or you're at home. And I talk about how to get your family members prepared and really think about it correctly.

Even if you have a really sophisticated disaster program, this is great. Then I talk about the recovery. And I use one sentence, it's a revolutionary sentence of business continuity, a sentence that my father was a business continuity planner. We use these sentences with big companies and I have distilled it down so that anyone, a family, a small business, can step-by-step recover their business.

And then finally, the last section is what I call reversing disaster. And reversing disaster is just what you and I have been talking about, Gordon. It's about how to take a disaster and look at it not through the destruction, but the beauty of the opportunities that are now revealed to you. What is that pearl that has now been revealed and how can you take advantage of it? I walk you through it. The final chapter, for those of you who buy my book, I hope you do, because I want you to start with the introduction and I want you to read the very last chapter, chapter 15, because there is an Indonesian tribe that I talk about in that, and they are the most disaster prepared society anywhere in the world. And the most important thing about them is that society has no concept of money. They are a cashless society and they are the most disaster prepared.

I challenge you to buy this book. I want you to enjoy it, read it. It's got a lot of funny stories. You can see the way I do things. I love to talk about things in a positive way because I tell people in the dedication, I always say, "This is to the people who live in the age of disasters. You got this." And I tell people, "You do. You have this. All it takes is some mindset changes and you can do some very dramatic things." And I encourage people to outreach to me, because for those of you who are interested, I'm going to be traveling around the country. I would love to do a disaster drill with you and your staff. It'll be the most fun thing. We'll put it on social media. We'll have a wonderful time and you will learn so much about how to truly turn and eliminate any disaster. Instead, turn it into an opportunity for tremendous success.

Gordon Henry:

Awesome stuff. Well, we're out of time, but thank you so much for coming on the show, Patrick. It's been great and great to have you here, and I hope people will buy your book.

Patrick Hardy:

Thank you very much, Gordon, I appreciate it.

Gordon Henry:

And I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family subscribe, and please leave us a five star review. We would really appreciate it, it helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo at thryv.com/pod. Until next time, make it a great week.

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