Picture your business caught up in the chaos of a disaster - may it be natural or manmade. Panic-stricken employees, clients bombarding you with questions, and a leadership team that is clueless about what to do next. Sounds like a situation you never want to be in, right? That's why we're talking with Jeffrey Weiss, founder of the Disaster Preparedness Network.
Jeffrey provides an overview of disaster preparedness - from setting up leadership structures to training responses to an active shooter situation. He reveals how the networks you develop can be leveraged to foster a community of preparedness and resilience.
Jeffrey also sheds light on how businesses can mitigate liability risks by investing in disaster management. In a world where disasters are no longer anomalies but rather frequent occurrences, being unprepared could lead to potential litigation and damage to reputation.
If you'd like to set up disaster processes in your firm, give Jeffrey and his team a call at (818) 624-4242 or email him directly at jeff@PreparednessTV.info.
BONUS: For Center Stage subscribers, Jeffrey is offering a free active shooter training course, which you can access by visiting https://training.preparednesstv.info/as-appointment. Even more, Jeffrey is offering his book, 60 Ways to Reward your teams, and your partner for being of value, for free by clicking here: https://tpn.mastermind.com/opt_in/2262
Picture your business caught up in the chaos of a disaster - may it be natural or manmade. Panic-stricken employees, clients bombarding you with questions, and a leadership team that is clueless about what to do next. Sounds like a situation you never want to be in, right? That's why we're talking with Jeffrey Weiss, founder of the Disaster Preparedness Network.
Jeffrey provides an overview of disaster preparedness - from setting up leadership structures to training responses to an active shooter situation. He reveals how the networks you develop can be leveraged to foster a community of preparedness and resilience.
Jeffrey also sheds light on how businesses can mitigate liability risks by investing in disaster management. In a world where disasters are no longer anomalies but rather frequent occurrences, being unprepared could lead to potential litigation and damage to reputation.
If you'd like to set up disaster processes in your firm, give Jeffrey and his team a call at (818) 624-4242 or email him directly at jeff@PreparednessTV.info.
BONUS: For Center Stage subscribers, Jeffrey is offering a free active shooter training course, which you can access by visiting https://training.preparednesstv.info/as-appointment. Even more, Jeffrey is offering his book, 60 Ways to Reward your teams, and your partner for being of value, for free by clicking here: https://tpn.mastermind.com/opt_in/2262
This podcast is brought to you by Spotlight Branding. Whether your firm only gets a few referrals or it's 100% of your business, you have the opportunity to double your referrals through educational, informative content. The pros at Spotlight Branding can help you create that content through blogging videos, email newsletters and more All designed to help you increase your referrals and attract the kinds of clients you want to work with. Visit spotlightbrandingcom slash pod to learn more. That's spotlightbrandingcom slash pod.
Speaker 2:This is Center Stage putting your firm in the spotlight by highlighting business owners and other industry experts to help take your firm to the next level. Hey everyone, and welcome to Center Stage. I'm your host, John Henson, and today we're talking about something that may not be something that you're actively considering when you're running your law firm, and that's disaster prep. Whether it's a natural disaster or maybe something else, it really is something that you should have a plan in place for how your firm will continue to operate in the event of some sort of tragedy or disaster taking place. And so, to help us with that, I am joined by the founder of the Disaster Preparedness Network, Jeffrey Weiss. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I appreciate it so much. I'm so happy to be here. I was looking at a lot of your shows and really really good work.
Speaker 2:Awesome, I appreciate that, and so, before we jump in, tell us a little bit about yourself. How'd you get involved in this area of work?
Speaker 3:Well, most of my life I've been a broadcast engineer and I've been developing broadcasting systems. I've built over 250 TV stations with one of my companies, advantage Video Systems, and we provide post facilities. But also, besides being an engineer, I've been a force for good in helping to volunteer. When I was 10 years old, I had this dear friend that I had known all my life and he was tragically killed by a drunk driver. And at 10 years old I was devastated. I loved him.
Speaker 3:And one thing I went to Baltimore to be with my grandmother and we took a trip to Washington. And on the trip to Washington we went to the National Portrait Gallery and there was an exhibit honoring the Roosevelt's and I stood before this giant statue of Eleanor Roosevelt and, looking up her confidence, my grandmother whispered her words to me when you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. Those words echoed for me and since then I have made my passion to always do everything to make a contribution. I was working at another company at 9-11 happened and I had been volunteering giving blood for the Red Cross and I told my boss I got to go help out. I got to go to New York and help out and he said no and I said yes and I said no and he said yes and he said no and I said I quit and I quit my job, went to New York, helped out with the Red Cross in various aspects and I really felt a passion for giving back. And ever since then I've been disaster managers, shelter supervisor, director of logistics, director of public relations officer, government relations officer, feeding manager, so on and so forth with the Red Cross. Plus, I've worked with CERT, the Community Emergence Response Team developed by the fire department, and it's a community member, people in the community coming together to help community members and to do disaster assessment and to help out at different things. We go on wildfires, we go out and do what's called water stations where we give water height, we hydrate, we hydrate the firefighters and stuff like that. So we really go out and engage with the community and I've developed connections with the fire department and done training with them.
Speaker 3:So I've done a lot of work in disaster, preparing for disasters and I was talking with some of my people and I was like I put some YouTube videos out on disaster preparedness for homes and I says well, why not businesses? There's a big lack. There's not that many businesses who are really understanding how to prevent disasters and how to deal with them. And there's two aspects for your listeners. That is, first of all, how does your law firm or your company prepare for disasters? Second thing is how does your clients prepare for disasters? And so these law firms have clients and there's a liability rate. There's a liability risk for disasters If you are a company and you don't prepare for disasters, whether it's a manmade disaster like active shooters or riots or something like that and insurrections, whatever we have, I don't know.
Speaker 3:And then, or it's nature made hurricanes, fires, floods, tornadoes, and they're giving me more and more prevalence. We've had more and more fires every year, more and more hurricanes every year, and these hurricanes are getting much more fierce. Tornadoes are up 60% over year and flooding is a drastic thing. We have levees. I mean as much as Biden and the Democrats are building, helping to build infrastructure with going even into Republican states and repairing dams. There's still a massive amounts of these things that are over the age and levees can break and things can happen. Rainstorms can cause mass flooding because we're overpopulating this. We're going into more and more areas and putting homes in these things, and then floods come and they do that.
Speaker 3:So disaster preparation is something that I take very personally and I want to help a lot of people. So I said I'm going to turn this into a business opportunity because and it's a really incredible, powerful thing and so we do a couple of different things. We do disaster preparations huge companies about how to prepare for disasters, and not only just how to prepare for disasters, but most companies who do oh I'm a pair of disasters, I'll get some dry goods, I'll get some this and that, but that's only part of it. You have to build a leadership structure to lead your teams in how to prepare for disasters, and if you don't get prepared, it's amazing.
Speaker 3:There was an incident in Texas last year in the winter storm and this huge storm came out.
Speaker 3:It was like a vastly powerful storm and parents couldn't communicate with their kids because the company didn't have cell phones went out, cell phone towers went out and their landlines went out, so they had no way of communicating.
Speaker 3:So what do doble parents do?
Speaker 3:They got in their car and they drove to get their kids right.
Speaker 3:That's probably what most of you would do, right? So the problem is that the storm got so severe and the only way the parents were crossing this bridge and they got frozen on the bridge and four people froze to death from that company. Now, after that, the kids were safe, the school had a program I tell you the families of those four people they got their own lawyers and that company is no longer in existence because the liability issue, because they didn't have a proper communication system. If they had had one person be a ham operator or had a satellite phone, because there's no snow in this space, and so if they had set up some kind of communications plan FEMA has it, red Cross has communications plans these different things have different levels of communication that you could have done and all it would have took is a few dollars and a few minutes, a few moments of their time to really lay out these things. But many people don't know how or don't know that there is a need for this or that. You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, let's talk about natural disasters Because I mean, you know, I've been working with lawyers for nine years now. I've known of clients in California who've been displaced by wildfires. I've known of you know clients in the Midwest who've been displaced by flooding. I've known clients in Florida who've been displaced by hurricanes Like. I've seen so many different examples of this. What does a preparation plan or even a response look like for a small firm, a small business, when it comes to some of these natural disasters?
Speaker 3:So it all starts with leadership. Everything rises and falls with leadership. You have to have the proper leaders in place to lead your teams and you must do drills and you must drill these things. And you know, I say preparation starts in the office but it expands to the community. So you have to have the right leaders to take on this task. Okay, so you have to find people who are inspired about this and who want to help their people and who want to take this on, because you have to have leadership on it and if anybody leave this thing, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're going to go to the local supply stop. You're going to buy some first aid kits. You're going to buy this or that. You're going to watch some videos. Oh, I need to buy a little go kit, but the go kit is going to expire. The band aid is going to the medications and the things that the first aid kits going to expire. No one's going to be able to find it during a panic.
Speaker 3:If you don't have the right leadership, nothing else. Everything rises and falls with leadership, and that's with any business. If you have a business, if you don't have proper leaders and you're not inspiring people to create new leaders, then you're out of business. You know you can start a business. This you know I was looking at your company and your marketing and all this stuff and the incredible people. You have to go out there and do all handle people's social media and and take in the slack that these people can do. But you do that because you lead by example. Your company leads by example and that's the. That's the thing. So it all starts with leadership, but then it starts after leadership. It starts with creating the correct planning and infrastructure. So you have to do that.
Speaker 3:So there's there's there's four pillars to a disaster preparedness plan. First of all, there's a foundation of what kind of equipment and the tools you need and having the right tools in place and having the right mechanisms and softwares and and so that second is having the right leadership and developing that. The third problem is to create public and private partnerships. You know, when you are planning for disasters, you've got to plan where you're going to go, what resources you're going to go, where can you go for help? Am I going to go? Where's a local fire department? Where is a local place that the Red Cross is setting up shelters? I got to know where those places, those shelter locations, are, because if I need to evacuate, I need to send my people there. I don't need to send my people to an area where no one's going to know where we are and we get lost and forgotten. We need to go where it is. So creating the right public and private partnerships are that engaging with the community.
Speaker 3:And then the fourth is showing appreciation. When you are building a, when you're building a plan, when you're building a plan to get out there and to and your whole team is involved in doing that you need to show appreciation to the people who are planning this so that they are inspired to keep it up. Because if you just say, okay, I want you to be a leader and to plan this thing out, and that's fine, and that's your and that's, I'm adding that onto your job, and that's it, and then you don't show them how much you appreciate them. They're going to find reasons not to do it. They're going to say, oh, my kids and I can't do it this week, they're going to find ways to. When you show a preach, when you don't show appreciation, people notice that, but when you do show appreciation, people notice that even more and they become more inspired to take that on. So those are the four pillars of creating a disaster plan organization, leadership, partners and rewards.
Speaker 2:Nice, I love it, and so I want to come back to that for a second. But I want to kind of ask about the other kind of element of disaster prep and the unfortunate nature especially as you talked about natural disasters becoming more prevalent also seems like a lot of these active shooter situations are becoming more prevalent and a lot of our audience might even be sitting here thinking like I'm a small law firm, it could never happen to me and it's like no, like there was a situation last year there was a small law firm in my hometown where a client was in a meeting. He apparently didn't like how it went and got up and started brandishing a gun. A lawyer ended up getting shot and killed in the office, and you know it's so. Those sorts of things do happen. So what are, what are some of the elements of an active shooter training that firms should probably think about having as part of their plans?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to. I'm going to say a common thing. It all rises and falls with leadership, but you know so if you have, because if you have good leaders, leaders are not loners. Most active shooter or people who do things, are loners. There's three major reasons why people conduct active shooter instances. One is lack of communication. Every active shooter that they've looked at, every single one, whether they looked at their diaries because they're no longer alive or whether they've interviewed them because they're in prison, all of them have said no one would communicate, no one could communicate with me.
Speaker 3:So that guy in that, in that, in that meeting with those lawyers, didn't get the right communication level. Okay, there was not a, there was, there was a breakdown in communication. That's what caused that problem. You know, obviously there was some other issues on in his, in his way, but if the right, if he had been communicated, if the right communication levels were done, you know, then that may have mitigated that.
Speaker 3:That's you got to learn how to communicate properly, learn how to you know, and it's you know, what lawyers do. Lawyers go into court, lawyers go into meetings and they communicate for their clients, but a lot. And they know how to communicate to clients on a legal aspect, but how do you communicate with people on a different aspect, on connecting with them. And so that's one thing we train on, we trade on leadership, we're john max will leadership coaches, and so part of all in all of our training, our foundation is is leadership and communication, and so that's the main thing is how do you? You know? So that's the thing.
Speaker 3:Second thing is people. People also commit. Commit these acts because not only communication, but because of of they feel isolated, they feel like loners, they feel like they're so when you promote people as a leader, they no longer are a loner. A loner is a leader, is not a loner by definition. A leader. You know, if you're a leader and you're going up a hill, there's no one behind you. You're a hiker, not a lead not a, not a leader, you know.
Speaker 3:And so that's what you need to do. You need to inspire people to become leaders, and and when people are leaders, they are not loners and they become powerful people in it. So that's, that's the second thing. The third thing is you got to do, when you know reason these actions is because people don't know the rights, how to see the signs. There are signs to you know.
Speaker 3:No one wakes up one morning and becomes an active shooter. People have signs. There are things that people do. You know. The people are coming in and they're late to work all the time. Something is causing them to come to late to work. Maybe they're having marital problems. Maybe they're there, they're they're. Maybe they had somebody passed away in their life and they're having that stress. Maybe they're going bankrupt, something like this, something is stressed in their life. Maybe they're just not, they're just not managing time correctly. So, and also people who argue a lot at work. If you have people, if you have a client that comes in and he's always argued menative, I mean we all, we are adversely, you know, but lawyers have deal with people who are adversarial in its nature, but if you, there's a level of different being adversary and being argumentative. If you have people who are always starting or being involved in arguments, those are people who are at risk, you know. If you have people who are depressed all the time these are some then there's a number of different signs that we can that we demonstrate on our classes that teach people about what to look for and what the science doing, how to mitigate those things.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we say is the absolute best way to turn people from these kind of things to not is volunteerism. You know, when you're a business, the three most important things in any business is retaining your best employees, attracting your best employees and building your company brand so that people, your clients and your investors and the community sees you in a positive outlight. Now, nothing does that cheaper and more powerfully than volunteering as a community, as a business. So if you volunteer as a business, then you go out there, your employees gain a sense of worth and accomplishment, which makes them better employees, less likely to do harmful things at work, less likely to steal, less likely to say bad words or do big instances like after shooters. Your client, your new employee, the new lawyers you want to come work for you are going to look for you and say, well, great, I make great margins, but I also help them marginalized, and so they're more apt to come to want to work for your firm instead of that guy down the street.
Speaker 3:And then, third of all, the community sees that you're giving back and helping people. And, like I said before, when you're not visible, these things, when people don't see you giving back, when they don't see you doing things in the community, then they see that. But when you do, people see that even more. When you're at the local food bank handing out food, when you're at the local church helping people, when you're at the local, you know, when you're at the local Red Cross helping people to do that, people notice that and you get. And that's and it's more than just a smart business opportunity. It's a great opportunity for building your business and it reduces the act of our tutors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and I love that. And you know just some of the things that I've heard so far in terms of you know how businesses can help themselves. It's it sounds obviously it starts with the leadership but it's developing that culture of you know the volunteering and just you know having that, you know giving that, having that giving mindset and stuff like that. You know one of the other questions that I wanted to ask you you know, growing up in school we would always do like fire drills or tornado drills or stuff like that. Is there an element of that that you encourage businesses to have where, even if it's like once a year, to just kind of review the disaster prep and response policies, doing any sort of like mock scenarios, anything like that? Like what do you suggest in an ongoing?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Part of our program is building drills for you. When we do those things, we build a set of drill exercises that we drill and you don't want to do them once a year. You don't want them doing twice a year. You want to do them as often as you can. You know I have people who do them every month. You know they get they do them every. I have people you know who do them every month, but they also send out reminders all the time on different things that people know, because you, at least at minimal, need to do it every quarter at minimal.
Speaker 3:Because you know people have a thing called muscle memory and when a disaster happens, everything you know goes out the window. When people panic, when there's an active shooter, when there's a flooding, when there's a fire, when these things happen, our minds go blank. That's what happens Now. If you drill this in and create a muscle memory, then it becomes second nature and it's not something you have to remember, it's something that you know. You know to go to this location, you know where the kits are, you know that they haven't expired because you have a date on your kits, on your go-bags, that tell you this has not expired, and I researched this. I know what's in the kit, you know. I know what's in the kit because I looked at it a month ago, you know. And so these are things that we do. So we have a set of drills and people drill this over and over and over again and you know, I had this one incident with this company and we were doing these drills and they were doing damage assessment and the job was for this team to go and, from body to body, see what was wrong with these people and move on to the next body.
Speaker 3:And these people would come. And they went to this guy and it was at mannequin and it said lost leg bleeding, you know. So the guy stopped the bleeding okay, which is good when it stopped the bleeding from the person's leg and then you need to move on. But he didn't want to move on because he said oh, this is my friend, I can't move on because he was so invested in this thing and he couldn't get out of it. He couldn't get that mindset to go, move to the next thing. But if he doesn't move on and assess all these other people, yeah, he may save that one person, but seven other people are going to die. So you've got to drill in these people so these people understand and they can comprehend how to do this. And so, yeah, we drill all the time, just like your school did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and that's really really good stuff and so share with us. You know how can people get in touch with you to learn more about just setting up any kind of preparation, training or system or anything like that that you can help them out with.
Speaker 3:Thank, you Certainly so. We have a couple of different programs that we do, but you can. You can reach us on our website, which is PreparednessTVinfo. You go to preparednessTVinfo and at preparednessTVinfo like right there you can you you can sign up and for an appointment and talk with us. We have disaster preparedness programs that treats you about fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, all these things. We have active shooter training we do, where we train people and it's a whole thing and it's usually an online course. We train people about active shooters and we go through the whole program and it's not only just you know how to do.
Speaker 3:We have a three phase active shooter program. One is what happens before an incident happens. How can you mitigate it? How can you stop the? Because the best active shooter incident is the one that never happens, yeah, so how can you mitigate it and what programs can you? You instigate that to mitigate that thing, and how can you?
Speaker 3:In the second part we do is the common run hide fight program that everyone knows. You got to run away first. If you can't run away, you hide. If you can't hide and you can't run away, then you fight, and the fighting is not tactical, military fighting. You know. No one needs to fight a. You know all this thing and people say, oh, every, we should arm everybody because then then everybody can stop the active shooter.
Speaker 3:Well, the problem is that shooting someone is not an easy thing to do. Believe me, I know, you know, I was in the military it is not an easy thing to do, to pull a trigger and kill somebody. The police don't just pick up a gun one day and say I'm going to go and do this thing. They train every single day To do that. You know so. Giving everybody guns just makes more guns and more problems. So you, we teach people not to learn how to fight, but learn how to defend themselves so they can run away. You know so. It's not. It's not run hide, fight, fight, kill them. Yeah, you should fight and subdue them, but if you, but you need to subdue them to, or stop them to a point where you can get away Because the police are coming. Active shooter instances are usually on on, or usually over within 15 minutes when they start, so it's not like it's a lot of time. So we teach you that.
Speaker 3:And then the third part is what happens after an incident, because that could be the most important thing, how you know. You know, basically, most companies throw up their arms and say, hey, I'm going to let the officials to feel it. You know, handle thing. Problem is officials do not have your best interest at heart. What they have is they're getting elected and they're political donors. You know who. Whatever you know, and and and their political ideology, that's what they have at heart. Your business and your brand is way down the line. Yeah, and the media also doesn't have your best interest in art. What they care about is their, their, their, their media's agenda, whether it's right wing or left wing, and Getting the clicks. So if they can trash your business and trash your people and get more clicks, they're gonna do that. Yeah, you know, I don't. You know you, we see it all the time and the and the and the. You know.
Speaker 3:So we teach you how to create public relations officers, to talk with those people media relations officers and then Disaster mental health people, because you need to take care of your people. You know to get them back to work, because the best cure is to get back to work. You know, and you need to be involved in every aspect, and we go through a whole training process on this. So we do that and and so we do. You know natural disasters, active shooters. And then we have a another course that is really popular. That's our corporate cultural service, where we teach people how to create a whole volunteer structure, like I talked about. You know how to get, how to give back, how to create the organization, the leaders, the partner, partners and giving, and how to how to be a b-corp certification, how to align yourself with the 17 goals, the un, how to get public and private Great, how to get grants and loans and let to pay for the thing. You know all these things we teach on this whole program and you can find that on our on our page as well, and I'll put the. I'll give you the links to put notes down in the field so you can put notes on this edit, on this video, so that people can find all these different programs that we offer.
Speaker 3:And For a limited time, we have a really cool offer that we're offering your listeners, which is for a limited time. We have a free active shooter training program. It includes a pre-assessment meeting, valued at $500. It includes a two hour or two and a half hour active shooter training program, valued at $500 per person and up to 25 people in that class, and it involves an after-class assessment meeting with your, with your leaders, to figure out what your next steps are. And so we offer all this for free.
Speaker 3:It's a 14 up to $14,000, and for your listeners and people who subscribe, you have to be subscribed, you have to subscribe this channel, you have to like this video and, and, if you like, and and, subscribe to this channel, and then we will give you a free active shooter program that will enable you to To to protect your people, and it really covers the entire thing. It's it, we cover the whole pull back, and so we offer that so that you can reach us. Like I said, my email is jeff at preparedness tvinfo, jeff at preparedness tvinfo. My phone number is 818-624-4242, that's 818-624-4242, and of course, we'll put all the links and stuff like that in the in the fields here, so you can, you can contact with us, but that's how to get in contact with them. We have a lot of training program, a lot of leadership programs, all that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome. Yeah, and I mean you know, I know, I know what we Don't have here and I would be willing to bet that a lot of our audience this is just something that they have just never really actively thought about as being just a really important aspect of how they run their firms. And so I really appreciate you coming on, really appreciate you sharing all of this insight, and I really do encourage people to go Uh and check out everything that you have and take advantage of this offer. And so, before we wrap up, I have one final question for you, and that is, if you had one final piece of advice for our listeners, what would it be?
Speaker 3:I would say, to really inspire your people to become leaders and to open lines of communication. I can't stress that enough. I would say that it really your business does it. People think about these things and they think about oh, this is extra stuff, it's not something that adds to the bottom line, but it's the same thing about what your services are, what your firm does and the way it does is. It's not just SEO, you're not just an SEO and marketing company. You really take it to the next level and do the things that and people think, oh, these extra things, they don't add to my bottom line, but they do. My training and your services add to the bottom line of these companies. So really invest in these things. Right now, in the state of California, active shooter trainings are mandated by the state of California and in many states it's mandated. So if you don't have these programs in state, another law firm is going to sue you, because I don't know whether your people know this, but lawyers are litigious.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a little bit, and if you don't properly protect yourself and your employees, law firms will sue you, your employees will sue you and the community will. But I would say one additional thing it's important that when disasters happen, your company responds to the community. That's one thing I didn't say here, because that would really help build your company's brand out there. You can put all the billboards on them and say if you're in an accident, call me, but really what does that is when you're out there in the communities in stress and your company is out. Your law firm is out there responding and helping people working in disasters, giving free legal advice at a disaster site. So people don't just think I'm talking to a, I'm talking to a service, offer free legal advice and do these things and get out there and engage with the community when these disasters happen, and that will help build your company too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. This has been really great. I know I've learned a lot. I didn't realize, honestly, how deep this really went, and so there are some ideas that I'm going to even take to our leadership team to potentially start doing some of this implementation as well. So I know some of my favorite episodes are the ones that I walk away with some ideas and learning a lot of stuff too. So I really appreciate you coming on and thank you all out there for continuing to listen. Please rate and review the show and so that new episodes get downloaded automatically, and that's going to do it for us this week. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 3:All right, Thank you. Everybody Subscribe and like and comment. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:To learn more, go to spotlightbrandingcom. Slash center stage.