Natural disasters – like several areas suffered this year – anywhere in the world can create grave challenges for many companies. If your supplier is forced to close down for days, weeks, or even months, it will affect your ability to get your product to market. A perfect example this year was Apple, which was unable to fulfill orders for the iPad 2 due to Japan’s challenges from a devastating earthquake. The orders were pouring in, but there were not enough iPads to ship out. Both the manufacturing processes and the logistics of moving materials and product were affected.

No matter how good your other marketing efforts are to promote your product, you can lose sales opportunities due to incidents anywhere in the world. As businesses get more and more dependent on what happens in places beyond their control, there will be more and more such situations.

It is important for companies to develop contingency plans and relationships with vendors in different places to assure that if one has to close down due to a natural disaster – or any other reason – they will have an alternate source for any critical piece. Successful companies need to be creative and develop a Plan B for every critical need before a disaster is upon them.