In my last article, I extolled the benefits of offering office building managers a Disaster Recovery Program to strengthen your company’s relationships with them. If you recall, we mailed more than 100 “Disaster Letters,” and 37% of the recipients signed up. Something amazing happened two months later that increased our enrollment to more than 60%. I’ll share that with you now.

As an afterthought, I sent an additional 10 letters to our largest customers who owned their own buildings or leased several thousand square feet in multi-tenant buildings. One of those who responded and enlisted in our program was KnowledgeWare, Inc., run by the famous football quarterback, Fran Tarkenton.

Two months after they enrolled, on a Sunday evening at 6 pm, I got a panicked phone call at home from KnowledgeWare. Our contact said she was desperately in need of our moving services. Her company had hired a plumber to install a water filter on their water fountain inside their office the day before. The plumber had done the work while the office was closed. You can guess what happened. Sometime later, the fountain sprang a leak.

KnowledgeWare was on the 10th floor of Tower Place in Buckhead—a popular office building that boasted many marquis tenants. It took until 5:30 pm on Sunday for the flowing water from their broken pipe to make it out their front door and travel all the way down 20 flights of inside fire escape steps (10 floors) to the lobby where the security guard saw it seeping from the stairway. He followed the path of the water up the steps until he saw the source. He called KnowledgeWare, who in turn, called a plumber, ServiceMaster, and me.

By 9:30 that night, we had a moving crew in their space shifting their furniture around while ServiceMaster vacuumed the wet carpet. Our Disaster Recovery Program worked for KnowledgeWare, and they were able to open for business Monday morning.

That following week, I recalled the incident in a follow-up letter and sent it to all the building managers. An additional 23% of the recipients enrolled in our Disaster Recovery Program. Because of the program more and more building managers recommended our company—so many in fact that it was not uncommon for the property managers from the buildings they were moving to and the buildings they were moving from to both recommend our service.

Do you see the value of having a Disaster Recovery Program? If you do, simply identify companies that could recommend your company and offer them your own version of a disaster recovery program.

Be sure to join our Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12060567

For more information on our online office moving training, please visit

https://www.officemoves.com/training/index.html or call Ed Katz at 404.358.2172.