14 June 2012
Media Release: Palaver Media on behalf of ICSB
Lessons learnt about SME recovery from natural disasters
Don’t underestimate the ability of small businesses to adapt.
This was one of the key lessons about the way that small businesses responded in the aftermath of the Canterbury
earthquakes, as shared this week with international visitors attending the World Conference of the International Council
for Small Business (ICSB) in Wellington.
The topic of SME disaster recovery and risk management was fully explored in a session moderated by Peter Townsend,
chief executive of the Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce, with speakers from New Zealand (Mark Steel of MED),
Australia (Barbara Cullen of Small Business Victoria), Japan/ India (researcher Prajakta Khare) and Dr Robert Lai of
APEC’s dedicated SME Crisis Management Centre (apcecscmc.org)
Mark Steel drew attention to the nimble ability shown by Christchurch businesses to relocate to fortuitously
under-tenanted business parks and other locations in order to recommence operations, but also noted the particularly
harsh impact of the Canterbury earthquakes on tourism and export education.
Barbara Cullen spoke at length about the collusion of bushfires and floods in the state of Victoria over the last three
years. A key element of the state government’s response targeted to small businesses was based around extensive use of
face-to-face business mentoring. This was “amped up” by having a Mobile Business Centre on the road to travel between
remote centres.
“Providing such a large amount of post-disaster business mentoring was expensive but it was effective,” said Ms Cullen.
Because of the severity and ongoing nature of the disasters, business mentors had themselves required counselling.
Two other features of the responses had been “buy local” campaigns to provide a stimulus for local businesses and a
focus on crisis essentials for tourism operators. Two observations Ms Cullen made were the value of spending time
predicting sectors that are likely to be most in need after a disaster, as well as assessing the effects on an area if a
local industry disappeared.
That kind of worst-case scenario was something that Prajakta Khare touched on in her presentation about the resilience
shown by the unique community of ceramics producers in the Japanese township of Mashiko, a popular visitor destination
that is almost entirely dependent on its historic cluster of potteries and that suffered almost total destruction when
Japan was struck by last year’s massive earthquake.
In her paper – adjudged and awarded at the end of the conference to be “one of the best” – Ms Khare assessed the
galvanising and unifying effect generated after the earthquake. Potters who had not really had much to do with each
other began to become organised at a level that had previously been missing – from a concerted voluntary reconstruction
effort through to the creation of new e-commerce sales channels and the formation of a new internationally focused
society to increase the promotion and exhibition of Mashiko’s wares. Other activity included a special donation of large
quantities of traditional pottery to tsunami affected regions and the re-use of broken ceramics in the interiors of
buildings.
“In many ways the disaster created more opportunities for more informal interactions that were more profound,” said Ms
Khare. “People were boosted out of a certain kind of inertia and can now benefit from more self-reinforcing mechanisms
to remain more unified”.
Dr Lai’s speech focused on the importance of business continuity planning (BCP), joint studies by APEC on that topic and
the formation of a new expert group on which New Zealand is represented by Erica Seville, a Research Fellow at
Canterbury University.
ENDS