Be prepared this hurricane season and protect your home-based business with tips from our Home Office Recovery Plan.

Margate, Florida (PRWEB) July 19, 2005 -- The 2005 hurricane season began with a bang, four tropical storms forming before July 5th, and two Category 4 Hurricanes -- Hurricane Dennis and Hurricane Emily before the peak of the season even began. With the memories still vivid of last years four major hurricanes and many homes and businesses still not repaired, many are wondering what can we do to protect ourselves? How can we prepare? Fortunately, the answers are as close as a new book on Disaster Recovery, Home Office Recovery Plan: The Disaster Preparedness Guide for Your Home Business.

Home Office Recovery Plan: The Disaster Preparedness Guide for Your Home Business offers a complete resource guide on contingency planning with customized forms enabling you to write down all the vital information necessary to keep your business functioning in case of a disaster. It includes essential information that is often left out, but critical to safeguarding your business, including outlining your corporate structure, who your clients are, any subcontractors, web information and hosting, and personal details as well. Youll be able to file insurance claims easily, learn ways to back-up your computer, have the information readily available and be able to have someone ready and able to come in and take over. This peace of mind is what you need this busy hurricane season.

Co-Author Diana Ennen, lives in Margate Florida and like many Floridians witnessed four hurricanes last year firsthand. Patty Gale had the unique experience of writing a contingency plan for clients in New York after 9-11. Both are successful home-based business owners. And both know how importance of this plan. Together they wrote this book on Disaster Recovery utilizing all their personal experience in an effort to prevent the alarming statistics that face home-based businesses. For example, did you know that 40 percent of all businesses hit by a natural disaster fail to reopen and 25 percent that reopen close within a year. This is according to the June 27th issue of the Sun Sentinel Newspaper in a column by Robyn Friedman.

You need to prepare and you need to prepare now, not only for hurricanes but also fires, earthquakes, floods, computer crashes, theft and anything else that could harm the survival of your small or home-based business.

Here are some tips that Ennen recommends all businesses follow to ensure their safety: Keep client contracts, wills, important papers, etc., in a safe location.

Document where all your important papers can be found.

Back-up all your files and keep a copy off site. Pay special attention to your client files. Check this back-up to make sure its working. Fed-Ex copy out of state if necessary.

Do an inventory of all your business property and take photos. Attach receipts to the inventory if available.

For additional disaster recovery tips and a free sample chapter of our book, stop by the Home Office Recovery Plans website at: http://www.homeofficerecoveryplan.com.

Media -- Diana Ennen is the author of several books on starting a virtual assistant business including Virtual Assistant the Series (http://www.VA-TheSeries.com). Shes the President of Virtual Word Publishing (http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com) is available for media interviews by contacting her at diana at virtualwordpublishing.com Co-author Patty Gale is the founder of Pattys Pretty Paper (http://www.pattysprettypaper.com) and is available by e-mail at patty at homeofficerecoveryplan.com.