For when things go off track
My younger daughter has gone back to uni. I drove her back to Loughborough, telling the security guard at the entrance to campus that I was “returning an inmate”. He seems to appreciate the joke!
She ran me 2 days later. She had woken up in her uni accommodation to no electricity. Strange she thought.
She opened up the uni app and discovered that a pipe had burst in a flat above (she is on the 2nd floor) and had flooded the flats below. So they had rightly turned off the electricity supply to the whole block.
Luckily for her, the flood was not in her corner of the block so she did not suffer any damage. Some of her friends did, however, as there were inches of water in some rooms, damaging their possessions.
The uni had to find alternative accommodation for 68 students.
They did well for Maddy. She was found a room in a flat across the courtyard, so didn’t have far to take all her belongings. Some of her friends were moved further away. She spent most of the weekend helping them move.
I can only guess at the nightmare this caused the uni.
But, like any other business, they probably had a contingency plan for when things like this happen.
This is an important part of running a business because things will go wrong, but I have found that many forget this when it comes to their marketing.
Take a product promotion for example. You cover the basics: how to enter; what products need to be purchased; what the prizes are and how they will be allocated.
But what happens if entry is via the post (because they need to include their receipt) and there is a postal strike, as we have experienced recently.
Or you’re sourcing your prizes from a 3rd party company and they go bust halfway through the promotion!
You need to cover this in your terms and conditions, and you need procedures that you put in place to deal with them should they arise.
It can be difficult to think all this through and make sure you are covered, so sometimes having an expert eye on your plans is needed.