Business Continuity

When disaster strikes, what will your broker do?

Very often there are no contingency plans in place, but at JM Rodgers we have had a comprehensive plan for disasters for many years. We were ready in 2012 when Sandy slammed the East Coast, and a vast majority of the companies in our industry were shut down for weeks. JM Rodgers was open within 24 hours of the storm- ready and functional. JM Rodgers is always pushing our firm to better ourselves, as evidenced in our recent ISO 9001 approval.

Our Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) has four principal elements.

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Additionally, JMR has created highly-prepared and durable offices in Sparta, NJ, our “bunker,” which has the advantage of being away from densely populated areas along with generators, office space, food, and other preparations that allow JMR to continue on even if a major event would affect the ability to operate in other offices. This office is the failsafe for JMR, giving us hardiness in the face of disaster.

Our Bunker runs on 2 generators that keep all our hardware running. This includes our VPN network that gives everyone at our company the information they need anytime anywhere even if something were to happen.
These buildings give us the perfect location for even more reasons: It’s critical that we remain close to Customs, and Sparta is located within 50 miles of Customs in Newark. Sparta is more than 50 miles from the coast, giving security as superstorms and flood zones that cause major damage hit hardest on the eastern seaboard. Finished basement space in both buildings has allowed us to add 66% additional space as needed. We are in the process of a reconfiguration project in the current workplace which will add 35% more space in the current usable area, nearly doubling our usable square footage.

We have installed workstations in each of the cubicles in the new space – making it a ‘turnkey’ office that could be up and running within one hour of a storm or immediate disaster. A major reason why JMR was able to survive through Sandy and subsequent weather events was the preparation with electric generators for our Elmont office and have repeatedly utilized them to power our office. Those generators are still a very big part of our natural disaster recovery plan. We’re proud of the continuous improvement we make, whether it be in process management or investing in real, physical improvements to our facilities.