How Small Businesses Can Achieve Climate Resilience With Joyce Coffee

Before we dive in, I want to share a quick update. Through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org, this community has now planted over 28,000 trees. That’s one tree for every new subscriber to this show and our newsletter. In some cases, that means up to four trees planted for every new subscriber. It’s proof that when we come together, even small actions can truly make a big difference. Thank you all for being a part of this movement.

Now onto my guest. I’m honored to welcome Joyce Coffee, president of Climate Resilience Consulting and co-author of The Resilience Advantage: A Small Business Guide To Preparing For Floods, Heat Waves, Wildfires, and Other Climate Disasters. Joyce has spent decades advising governments, Fortune 500 companies, and community leaders on how to turn climate risk into true resilience.

She’s here to help us understand what small businesses, the backbone of our economy, can do to prepare for climate disruption, protect their people, and even thrive in the face of adversity and unforeseen challenges. With that, I hope you’re welcome, Joyce, to the show with me. It’s nice to have you here.

Corinna, thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here. I appreciate the work that you do.

Joyce Coffee Of Climate Resilience Consulting

Thank you. You’ve spent decades working on resilience, planning. You’re at the intersection of business policy and community. What inspired you to do this work and to co-author The Resilience Advantage now?

To me, the climate change challenge is the humanitarian challenge of our time. I’m inspired every day to think about how we can better save lives and improve livelihoods in the face of this climate disruption that is facing most of our communities in the United States and around the globe. That tends to hurt those who are most vulnerable, first and worst.

Isn’t that the sad truth? I would love for you to share a moment from your consulting work where you saw firsthand how we could address this type of vulnerability or engender resilience for a small business during a climate disaster.

Most of our work throughout the last couple of decades has not focused on small businesses. This is why we wrote the book. The vast majority of leaders with funding or policy know-how have not been focused on the small business sector. For us to pivot our attention towards that, which is the heart of our economy, we realized that we would have to write a book that would identify all the actions that small businesses can take to survive and thrive in the context of this huge change challenge.

To earn the license to continue to operate in their communities and potentially even to earn more market share if they are in fact on the cutting edge of resilience solutions for their community, or the value change that is the chain that they are a part of. It was a very easy pivot for us to move away from some of the work that we had been funded in the prior eras and apply that work that we’d done for affordable housing or public health or infrastructure services for cities, for communities, to the question, “How can my business survive and thrive in the face of this growing disruption?”

Preparing The Right Resilience Plan

The skeptic in me wonders how you could take these approaches, which might be more proven in large systems, to then create something that would work for a small business. Can you talk a little bit about that?

The vast majority of our work is for community-based organizations and very small institutions. For instance, it might be for an environmental justice organization on the South Side of Chicago, or it might be for a food advocacy organization in a portion of Puerto Rico. It might be for the air quality impact in Denver, Colorado.

In fact, these are institutions that have people they want to protect, that have buildings or other property that they’re eager to shore up that do not necessarily profit, but economies that they’re eager to create stability and safety for, and that have a purpose. They have a purpose to protect their community. That means that they have a lot of the constituent parts of a small business. That’s where we chose to focus the work of creating small business resilience and supporting gritty and mighty small business leaders who are already in the business of thinking about protecting their people, protecting their profit, protecting their property, and being a purposeful member of their communities.

For us, it wasn’t a hard lift. We are also a small business ourselves, and we have been for a decade, and we’re part of a lot of entrepreneurial communities. Even if a business has been around for decades, maybe it has gone through different generations, small businesses are almost always entrepreneurial. They’re very much cunning and looking for opportunity and innovation, and that’s how they’ve survived. We don’t see it as a big change from a lot of the work that we’ve been doing in those other sectors.

You mentioned a striking statistic within the work, one that claims that 40% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster. I also know this is true of restaurants. My family and friends have direct experience with this, but 90% of small businesses fail within two years without a resilience plan. Do you have a statistic for how much a resilience plan can improve their chance of success?

Thanks for rattling off the stats, and I think they are important. Behind each one of them is a family that’s trying to survive, or a set of staff that just want to get their hourly pay, and a main street that wants to stay solid. The stat that gets me is that only 26% of small businesses have an actual disaster plan, but 94% believe they’re ready to handle disasters.

In my view, this points to a very specific issue with a small business versus a large business. That is that small business leaders hold the key to the castle. If you have a president or a CEO of a small business, he knows how finances work, he knows all the parts of his building, and he knows his staff, unlike a CEO of a large company that has an HR department, a finance department, and an operations department.

This is a wonderful thing. He’s in charge. He can actually determine his resilience direction and journey much more readily than a large company CEO. What he doesn’t have is time or resources. This is why I believe a lot of the planning never happens, or if it happens, it’s very temporary. It’s like, “We’ve just had a big event, let’s get ready for the next one,” and it gets forgotten. As small business owners, we are focused on what is front of our minds for us now. You were talking about your family owning a restaurant. The fact that so few small businesses come back after a disaster has to do with the fact that we can only focus on what is in front of us.

One of the things that we’re trying to help small businesses see is that creating a plan and making it part and parcel of what you do with your team is not hard, and it can bring benefits now. That’s part of what the resilience advantage is. It can make your team feel more secure, more trusting in the work that you do. It can make your building more comfortable every day, and it could mean that you’re a business that’s open when others have not been able to open. You actually grow your market share after a disaster. That’s one potential outcome of being a more resilient place.

Proper resilience planning will allow a business to open earlier than others after a disaster and significantly grow their market share.

How To Prepare For Natural Disasters

You cover a wide range of hazards in this book, from heat waves and floods to drought and wildfires. I’ve personally seen issues like ice storms impacting our distribution center, for instance, because they’re in Texas. Suddenly, all of the people who go into the office to ship packages, guess what? Nothing is moving. UPS isn’t going to pick up, nor is USPS. There are inherent delays. These create log jams in any business, which can be hard to recover from quickly because you only have so many man-hands at a time that can process these packages. I wondered if you could talk a bit about how a business might prepare for these sorts of challenges in today’s world.

By the way, it is climate weirding. It’s not just warming.

It is weird weather, yes.

Extreme heat is the largest killer among climate hazards. It takes more lives than floods, windstorms, and wildfires combined in the United States every year. Extreme cold is also part of the situation, especially for places that have not typically experienced that. It tends to be that these cold storms are part of what we’re calling convective storms, which is a word that most of us didn’t even know a decade ago.

In the insurance industry now, it’s a common parlance, but if you were to have asked an insurance agent a decade ago what convective storms are, they would’ve been like, “What?” It’s a change in airflow that causes extreme cold. I could give you some important, quick tips about how to handle another very common peril, hazard, or other synonyms.

For instance, it’s not just about having a plan. It’s about doing some of these very basic cost savings. For instance, securing your site and bringing in or anchoring outdoor furniture and signage. This is something you mentioned in Texas. This is vital to do. Loose items become dangerous projectiles during high winds, and they can then impact the building, or they can impact your neighbor’s building. In any case, they’re not good for the overall community.

Strengthening your building envelope, so checking your roofs, your doors, and your windows. These reinforcements, like storm shutters or door braces, are not that expensive. They do cost something, and most small businesses don’t have a lot of cash on hand for these sorts of things, but the stitch in time that saves a dime. The cost savings of these simple tactics can reduce costly damage.

Another one that is so important is to have a safeguard plan for your records and data. You and I are in this high-tech room. As we were starting here, you were talking about your tech and your reliance on it, your microphone, and that kind of thing. The bottom line is that many small businesses don’t have a lot of high-tech systems. They haven’t backed up their financials. They don’t have insurance, and they don’t have their customer contacts in the cloud. If they did, that quick access might mean faster claims or faster reopening. These are very pragmatic suggestions, but they’re the sort of thing that a small business owner would have to do in the evenings or on a Sunday when they have the extra moment to take this in.

Given what we’ve been through in the last decade, especially the last few years with COVID, many businesses have been forced to, whether it was uncomfortable or not, start to think about some of those things, like shifting to cloud-based systems, ensuring that employees could have access from home. In the case of ice storms, for instance, if they’re not able to go into an office, at least you could take care of customer service and some other things from a remote location.

That could then hasten your catch-up when you’re back in the office, whether it’s printing files and having them ready to go when you are able to get back in the office, or anything. It could be any number of things. More businesses have integrated those resilient non-negotiables. These are the things that we all need to do in this day and age to ensure that our businesses can survive and thrive in some strange disaster. Because I work from home, this means that I have installed a generator in my home.

This is it. If I might say, one thing that you could do in the event that you’re in an area where a convective storm could bring an ice event is to test your generators. Be sure you stock your batteries next to your generator. Know how to shut down your equipment and restart key equipment safely. The other piece of this, and COVID didn’t help us with this so much, but elevating your electric panels and your HVAC units so that they’re not potentially flooded.

Especially in an ice situation where you could have flooding, keeping things above potential flood levels prevents total shutdown. Although we’re talking at one point about ethereal stuff of helping your staff to know how to contact one another, how to stay in touch with your clients and customers, there’s also this physical stuff that is vital.

In our case, I live in Northern California, so it’s not the ice storms, but it’s wildfires. Every time the wind started to blow hard, PG&E would shut off the power, and sometimes that would be for as many as a few days. I simply can’t exist working, studying, doing all the things that I do online, given my remote access situation, if I don’t have power.

Many of us looked at things like doing long-term battery storage and things along those lines, but I don’t have sufficient solar panels to cover 100% of our energy needs, so we are still connected up the line to PG&E. We made some cost-benefit analyses. I could invest $20,000 in a power wall where we’re taking more energy from PG&E and storing it on site, or we can spend a few hundred dollars on a generator that is set up for propane.

Propane doesn’t go bad the way gas does. If we wanted to, we could tie it into our propane line. We’ve chosen not to do that. We just have a couple of tanks, and a couple of tanks can last me eight hours if I need them. At least in this situation, if I need it, it’s there. I didn’t have to invest $20,000 because I didn’t have $20,000.

The prior couple of years, we started to deal with insane floods due to atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones hitting the coast, again, terms that were not in our common parlance a few years ago. The rain cloud has been sitting overhead and dumping all the water in it for a long time meant that our ground got fully saturated, even though I’m on a hill and I’m not at the bottom of the hill.

My yard basically had water steep underneath my foundation and flooded my office. We had already incurred over the course of about a year $30,000 in improvements to ensure the water could not get in, including foundation repair, some exterior wall work, exterior door replacements, and all of these things, which could equally be incurred by a business.

Weathering a storm, whether it be working from home and having that home space that you have to protect or going into an office that you rent and could confront many of these same issues, can create some real challenges. Sometimes, you had to sit down, brass tacks, with paper and pencil and say, “What can I afford to do now that will mitigate this issue today so I can live to fight another day?” In particular, for small businesses, that’s the thinking that they need support with, because often, they’re staring at Mount Everest, “What do I do?”

Doing An Internal Cost-Benefit Analysis

You are such an advocate for resilience advantage. You’re proof of several of the important pathways that we describe in the book, but the most important being that you identified your critical risks and then did your own internal cost-benefit analysis to see what it was that you could afford. It does sound as though it took a few shocks to get to this place.

Identify your critical disaster risks and do your internal cost-benefit analysis to see what you can afford.

You didn’t do it during the first atmospheric river, and you didn’t do it the first time that you were out of power. That’s true. You were asking earlier about what would compel small businesses to do this. The data show that, like any human, you have to be hit once, be hit twice, and maybe a third time before you begin to have the time or to find the time in your day to make these big choices.

A couple of things I wanted to point out about the choices that you made. One, for small businesses in communities, especially when we’re talking about things like wildfire, which do have so much to do with what’s happening not only in your physical space but around you, getting connected to your business improvement district or your community in some way is vital.

In fact, there are examples of businesses going in together on generators. Advocating for PG&E to make a change is not only time-consuming but can also be very costly. Getting yourself essentially some mutual aid where you’re thinking together about what the strategies are that are going to protect this part of Main Street or this set of businesses that are set off in this more rural area.

You know better than I that Main Street isn’t actually where most small businesses are. We’re careful not to characterize that as the be-all and end-all. Main Streets exist because of small businesses, but most small businesses exist without Main Street. I love to hear your stories, and I’m so grateful that you’ve made these choices because that allows you to continue to serve.

It’s also fundamental. Many of the tactics that you and I might be thinking about and talking about in our conversation here are made a little bit easier through artificial intelligence. In the book, we make it clear that, for instance, if you need to communicate with your community, that is your customers, your clients, your staff, AI can create a very clear communication so that when you’re adult, because everything seems to be going wrong, you can get something out that’s very clear and helps with your own brand, as one example.

Also, AI can help with making a plan. Type in your address. AI can help you understand what are the risks that this place faces, and then what are some of the tactics if you also share with AI what the nature of your work is. How many people work with you? Do you own your building or do you rent it? What are you producing? How are you serving? We found that it’s a very different day now than it was even a few months ago in terms of being practical and very specific around climate resilience plans that can be put into action quickly.

Why Relying On Federal Resources And Insurance Is A Bad Idea

In some cases, I will remind people that if their governor or the president issued a state of emergency in a particular area, often, there are other funds available to them, either as tax relief or even funds. I know there’s less from FEMA or things like that these days. At the time that we had experienced all of the flooding issues and basically two back-to-back rainy seasons, we were able to get some tax relief. I couldn’t do those calculations. That was my CPA, but it meant that we didn’t end up paying as much in taxes that year, which was incredibly helpful, especially given the fact that we did have an outlay of about $30,000.

I love that that was true for you. I will say that it is a slightly new day in terms of being able to rely upon federal resources for disaster recovery. We do point out in the book that there are SBA-related resources, but one thing we are very careful about is to remind small businesses, because there are a lot more resources for households than there are for small businesses in recovery.

One of the sad reasons for that statistic of only 40% of them reopening is that there’s a lot less money in the various hazard programs that FEMA runs or that HUD, Housing and Urban Development runs or ran in the past. Small business has to be their own builders and suspenders. They have to figure it out themselves.

I have a similar story that would relate to that from a not-for-profit on the central coast that had intense flooding and didn’t get the same relief that I got.

If you are a home-based business and you can claim some of these as home-based assets, you should try that because there might be more resources available to you. There are some small business-related resources, but the same is true for insurance. It’s getting harder and harder to be insured in places that have high climate risks.

I could tell you all about the issues that my friends have experienced when it comes to fire insurance, even in my local area, where State Farm has said they will not bring in any new policies, and they’re on the state plan, which is about double the cost in many cases. Insurance costs for the last few years have increased by over 30% every year. The maximum level is decided by Congress. The maximum level is what is being raised every year because of our risks. I am paying more than three times for my fire insurance what I was paying when we bought the home in 2009.

I’m so sorry. You are one of millions of Americans who are facing a huge crisis of insurance.

The same is true for businesses. The costs for any of these insurances are much more now.

In the case of small businesses, it can be even more complex because of those state plans that you mentioned. Number one, they are much more costly. Some states are a little bit in the balance. I’m sure you followed in California that it was unclear whether the state plan was necessarily going to be able to re-up itself to this level it was before for wildfire.

By the way, these state plans are generally focused on wildfire. They’re often called Fair plans. In Florida, they have a citizen’s plan, which is primarily for wind damage. We were careful. Advisors said to us in the book, and many of the other people in the resilience scene, were like, “You’ve got to put insurance as one of the first chapters.” I was like, “Actually, no. We’re putting it as the last chapter.”

Here’s why. Small businesses cannot rely on their insurance to cover what it is that they have lost. They actually need to put in place their own resilience tactics. That’s what will bring them the resilient advantage. If they rely on risk transfer, which is what insurance is, so that you get you pay your policy and then you get a payout, it’s not going to be enough. It’s possible that in future years, they’re not even going to be covered to the extent that they were if insurance continues on the trajectory it’s on.

There’s one other existential issue around small businesses and insurance. That is that in some places, as you mentioned, small businesses will not be able to be insured for the flood, the heat, or the wildfire that they face. Therefore, they may have to move. This is as traumatic a decision as it is to think about picking up and moving your family.

It typically is a decision that one would want to make over the course of five years, a decade, not in some urgent situation where either you’re renting and the owner of your property jacks up your rent by some astronomical amount because he doesn’t have insurance any longer and he’s having to self-insure, or you’re an owner and you cannot pay for that self-insurance.

It’s like your calculus is that it’s better for us to get out of harm’s way than it is to be creamed in the next event and not have any money for recovery. We do cover this question of relocation in the book. If I were talking to other sustainability people, they would literally be booing me out of the room. It’s such an incredibly hard topic to broach. It’s easy for me to say. I’m sitting here in Chicago, which is a relatively safe place, but in the event that we are not planning to thrive in 2035, we could be out of luck if we don’t put retreat, relocation, or some modification of the actual space where we are working on the table as a solution in some of these very vulnerable places.

Addressing The Rising Cost Of Energy

Key to that point, I’m in Santa Cruz County. There are a lot more trees here. While it may be more expensive on a personnel basis to hire people in Silicon Valley, there are far fewer trees and far less risk than you might experience here because there are more planned communities. The land is flatter. All of that goes into effect to support the resilience of a community as a whole. I think you’re talking about that, too. It’s what types of access you have. At the same time, another cost that is coming up that is impacting businesses nowadays that may not have been anticipated is the rising cost of energy. I wondered if that was something that you could talk about.

We certainly do talk about it from the perspective of extreme heat, which I mentioned at the very start of our conversation. One thing that is very true about extreme heat is that it has a huge impact on productivity. If you are thinking about how much product or service you’re getting out of an employee in an extreme heat context, you have to put that in the same conversation as your question about how much you’re paying for energy, and especially how much you’re paying for cooling. I’m on the resilient side of things. I feel it’s important for us to offer cooling to our staff, maybe in places where we hadn’t previously.

If I were on the greenhouse gas reduction side, I’d be talking about, “We all have to be confident that we can work in a hotter environment,” but that’s not fair because many of the people who work in environments that do get hotter, let’s say they work in the factory or they work in agriculture, or they work in construction, they may not have adequate cooling at home. The body needs cooling at some point during 24 hours in order for it to be healthy and certainly for it to be productive.

The body needs cooling at some point during 24 hours for it to be healthy and productive. The number of accidents goes up exponentially on a hot day.

The number of accidents goes up exponentially when the heat goes over the typical threshold for a hot day, wherever you are. Phoenix has a different threshold than Chicago. When I think about the cost of energy in the context of climate resilience, number one, I’m asking myself as an advocate for small business leaders, how are they going to pay for the increased energy costs that they’re going to need in order to keep their people safe?

How are they going to use natural cooling, shade, water breaks, and other means to increase the safety of their team in addition to increasing the cooling load that is required for the process that’s underway in their business? We look at it a little bit differently. You and I were speaking earlier about the vulnerable being hit first, and worse. The vulnerable typically have a much higher energy burden.

What I mean to say is that when you’re a small business, and let’s say you’re in a lower income community and you are a member of a lower income community yourself versus being a high-net-worth White person working in a lower income community, your energy burden, you’re water burden, you may be paying more for rent than you’re getting from your landlord. All of these things mean that it is harder to prioritize resilience.

The last word I would have on this is that you can’t do it alone. The quest, for instance, for decreasing the need for cooling does not stop outside the fence line of your business, whether that’s the front door, because you’re in a home-based business, or the outskirts of the big supply area that you have on the outskirts of your property.

You need help from the city government to put in place more cooling structures, for instance, change the building code to increase albedo, which is the reflectivity of a building, so it doesn’t get so hot during the day and stay hot all night. For more green space. You mentioned trees, which are a huge element of cooling. You might need help from the large business that you are supplying to.

Large businesses are compelled now in a way they never were before to report to their shareholders about their risks. They are identifying things like energy burden, the need for more cooling, the potential for flooding, wildfire risks, and all those things in their small business value chain. What they could do is they could flee that value chain and try to go somewhere else. The absolute truth is that you cannot escape climate risks.

Increasingly, we see larger companies investing in their small-scale rich supply chains to improve energy efficiency and all the other things that will help to make sure that they get more crop per drop of water or more security in their supply chain, that they’re going to get the product that they’re expecting, or more productivity. There are fewer errors if they’re in a service economy. Those are important partnerships that small businesses need to rely on more and more, and demand from cities and from large companies.

Prepare For Risks By Starting With Smaller Costs

I’m wondering if you could share perhaps a favorite case study from the book that shows resilience in action, where a small business turned a potential disaster into an opportunity.

I think there are some great small business stories in the book. A couple of them that I like the most are related to breweries. It’s amazing to me how much the brewery gets people’s attention. In Asheville, North Carolina, New Origin Brewery, which is a local loved business, faced this catastrophic flood damage after Hurricane Helene. I was mentioning earlier about the projectiles in the windstorm. In this case, it was quite unprecedented.

Railroad cars came off the tracks and crashed through their building. New Origin Brewery filed a flood insurance claim, but sadly, the gap is still too large for them to bridge. They didn’t feel they could take on more debt. They did apply for a FEMA-funded property buyout program that would aim at preventing future damage, so that they could get out of harm’s way, and they’re waiting for word on that.

There are a few things that I wanted to share about this story. Number one, it wasn’t just flooding from water coming off their site. There was something outside of their site that affected them. You have to think well beyond the boundaries of your firm. Number two, they did have flood insurance, but it wasn’t enough. Number three, they are looking at relocating. Number four, they were trying to rely upon a federal program.

Ultimately, what New Origin Brewery is doing now is making its own plan for a shift to a different place. They’re relying upon their current customer base to help them out. They’re taking proactive steps to adapt by finding other properties that are a lot less threatening, and they are still in touch with all of their customers. I appreciate the hard work that they’ve done. Let me also take one more, if I may.

I recall seeing this particular story on TikTok. I remember the owners essentially sharing with their story that they had invested essentially their life savings in this entire venture. It was relatively new. They hadn’t been in business that long, as I recall. This all meant that they were caught in that perfect storm of not having established themself fully and not having the same equity even in their business as an older business might have, and then this perfect storm comes in.

I believe they were also one of many that set up a GoFundMe. Those things even come with strings and aren’t necessarily brought to you directly on a timeline that you would need in order to execute the things that you need. My heart goes out to them because there’s no way that they could have prepared for this disaster.

First of all, when one puts one’s life savings in their business, now, different than before, our future looks a lot different than our past. We have to be thinking about the future as one that’s more extreme events. Having a larger self-insurance, like a larger picky bank for the extreme events, having a smaller footprint starting out smaller than you were before, and being in partnership. There are different pathways that we would not have thought of.

In a way, what you’re suggesting seems to be to ensure your nut is smaller in the beginning.

Yeah. Ensure your costs are smaller in the beginning so that you can set more aside for the eventuality of some very risky thing. I don’t think this is necessarily the death nail of that small company.

Resilience planning ensures your business costs are smaller in the beginning and allows you to set aside more for eventual disaster risks.

I hope that it’s not. We all need spaces for community to connect and gather. The place of a brewery, a coffee shop, a pub, these spots become even more important as more and more of us are working from home or working remotely and not having that same sense of community in our office or with office culture. I think that’s important. People in Asheville are very resilient as a group of people, anyway. My hopes are high for them as well.

The Right Way To Handle Insurance Contracts

If I may share another story. I think the breweries are important. There are also so many of these major events that don’t make national news. You are a voracious consumer of news. It doesn’t surprise me, but it’s pretty cool that you knew who I was talking about.

I cared about these big events that have happened. What are the climate effects? How can we foresee the next one? Is there a way that we can support people during these times? The importance of community is higher than ever. This is one of the things, or one of the stories that you connect throughout the work. You’re essentially not separating the idea of community from small business. They’re essentially the same.

The community needs small businesses. Small business needs a community. Small business needs a community with a capital C, like big corporations, their city, but they also need a community like their staff and the people that come through their door every day. One other thing I wanted to point out, and this is probably true of many of those risks that you yourself have faced in your business, so many small businesses are damaged in climate events that never even make the local news, let alone the national news.

These are the ones that I’m like, “We have to do better.” There are some phenomenal outcomes. There’s one I love because I’m in Chicago. Mityne Lewis is the owner of Peas in a Pod daycare. You were talking about how important small businesses are for the community. Our daycares, if we don’t have a place to put our kids during the day, we can’t go to our hourly job, and we will get fired.

It was challenging.

Absolutely. I’m telling you. People who were frontline workers face challenges that were dramatic in that way. You could imagine this daycare in Chicago, which had flood damage from a rain event. In Chicago, we have a combined sewer system, so flood waters that are on the street can come into the basement. They were forced to shut down operations. Daycares are operated to a very high public health standard. You can’t have standing water.

She was organized because Chicago is known to have flood events in her neighborhood. She had all her paperwork in order, and after a flurry of calls to all the parents and checking on her staff, it wasn’t a big flood event for everybody else, but they couldn’t come into the office, so they couldn’t earn any money. She qualified for a grant from the US Chamber of Commerce. They have a resilience program.

It kept her staff employed, and it gave her the tools to recover and to prepare. She knew the money was coming, so they gave her money. She was able to borrow from friends, not from the bank, to get stuff cleaned up. This is the small, gritty stories. This is what it’s about. If a train comes off the tracks and screws your brewery, that is a big deal. Many of these small events are big events for the 1, 2, or 10 companies that are affected. Those are folks, too, who can benefit from spending the Sunday getting their act together with their planning and their processes.

One of the things that I will recommend everyone do if you have fire insurance, as an example, and probably applies to flood and other insurance that you might be spending money on each year, is to be sure you understand your policy, that you understand present building repair costs. Many people only revisit these things every ten years.

What the forest fires and floods, and everything else, forced me to do was sit with my insurance agent and say, “I want to do an assessment of my rental property. I want to do an assessment of my home property and make sure that I’m properly insured.” Increasing your insurance coverage doesn’t go up by as much as the minimum policy piece.

For me, it was worth it to spend $500 more a year than I might have before, even though it had come up a lot, because I was sure now that my building could be replaced. I’ve seen too many friends execute their fire insurance policies who were only able to build a structure that was roughly half the size with the insurance money. They’re taking out loans from their 401(k) in an area where we already have insane property costs.

You cannot buy a single-family home in Santa Cruz County for less than $1 million unless it needs a lot of work. For people to understand that as a baseline, and to understand when they’re buying insurance, what it does and what it does not cover. Even for people with a work truck. I’ll give another for instance. A contractor in my local area also has school-aged kids who are going to my school. He had a tree fall on his truck, but it also fell on his trailer.

His trailer didn’t have the same insurance coverage that the truck had. It was attached to the truck at the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. Again, this whole thing essentially got worked over, and it meant that the cost of the replacement and the repair, if it could be repaired, but the trailer piece was not going to be covered by insurance at all.

You have to, in some cases, set aside an immeasurable amount of time to fight with insurance companies to find out if there’s a way that they can possibly cover even partial replacement or something along these lines. Making sure you’re very clear with what your policies cover and what they do not, what’s an act of God versus what is considered a covered event, is very critically important. I think even more so for small businesses because you can’t necessarily go out and spend the $10,000, $20,000, or $40,000 on a whim in many cases.

First of all, you are writing the book here. Every chapter, we say, “Meet with your insurance provider.” We also say, “Take annual pictures and videos of all of your key equipment and spaces.” Another tactic that we suggest is using generative AI. My insurance policy is a little bit Greek to me, and I’ve been working in this space for a long time. I get bummed out when I can’t understand my paperwork. If I put my policy into generative AI and I say, “Write this in plain English. Give me the highlights. What am I covered for? What kind of risks might I not be covered for? What should I be worried about with regard to this policy?”

Doing that gives me so much more ammunition essentially when I want to go and sit down with my insurance broker because I can speak her language a little bit better, which makes our conversation a lot easier, but I can also test the waters with her about like, “Is this enough? What would happen? Let’s go through the scenario here if the worst were to befall my firm.”

I do think that we have resources now that, even though we don’t have a chief financial officer or a chief risk officer, because we’re very small businesses, we have an associate in generative AI that can make us feel a lot more confident going into those conversations that can otherwise be quite stressful. Ultimately, we know that when we leave that office, we’re going to be spending something more than we were when we walked in. Hopefully, we’re going to feel a lot more confident that spending on that will help us in the long run. Certainly, we’re going to earn a lot more respect from our insurance broker because most people are not asking questions like you did. Congratulations.

Using Generative AI With Utmost Care

I would like to give you two caveats on this. I use ChatGPT. I would say I’m not an expert, but I use it as a research assistant for my PhD program. I’m using it for a lot of different things. I use it to help me find relevant research and third-party peer-reviewed studies. I also use it to help me code and decode things like long-form interviews, to do axial coding, and things along these lines, which is a method of qualitative research. I’m stretching it, and what I do notice is that you have to pay close attention to what you’re asking ChatGPT or other generative AI to do. You have to check its work almost like you would check a student’s work.

What I’ve found to be most effective, especially when it comes to things like contracts, your agreement with any insurance prior provider is a contract, is to break it into chunks. That forces you to be thinking about, “What about this section of my contract? You could have read it but not understood it as plain English, as you’re talking about. Ask ChatGPT, “Can you look at this section? I want to understand this.”

They’re less likely to make hallucinations or assumptions from other policies that might exist on or that it might have had access to at some other point, so being very clear with what your present understanding is. I’ve found it even more successful when you say things like, “My present understanding of my policy is this. Can you please review, given that lens, and help me see where there might be holes or risks?” It works better in those cases because you’ve given it framing. I think it’s important to frame your questions and start in chunks, and as you get more comfortable, you’re going to identify when it seems a little bit like it’s gone off the rails.

I would say we do have AI prompts throughout the book that help to hopefully make the questions dialed up enough that you can get the information you want. Here’s the bottom line. Small businesses are already proving that they can use AI wisely and with the same discernment that they bring to every other business decision.

A lot of my peers in the climate movement are reticent to recommend AI. If you are a small business and you have very few staff, if you don’t have someone saying, “It’s okay, you can try it. It’s not going to hurt you,” you might be missing out on something that would help you with your competitive advantage. It bums me out, especially when I’m working with community leaders, for other non-community folk like leaders of the city or whatever who are very hesitant to suggest community leaders get invested with AI.

I’m like, “Why would you do that? The big corporations are using AI. You don’t think the community leader can handle it? She is making tough decisions every day, and she’s interacting with all sorts of badass leaders. She can absolutely handle it. She will be able to look at the material that she gets out of AI and question it and determine what works for her and what doesn’t and what needs to go back to the drawing board.” I totally agree with you about what we have to be cautious about. I also think that we are small and mighty business owners, and we can do it even better if we continue to push AI to serve us at the highest possible level.

I 100% agree with you, and I think one of the things that holds small businesses back is that they’re worried, in some cases, “If my staff starts using AI, what am I paying them for? They’re just doing prompts. They’re not doing the work.” My earlier point stands. You have to know what you’re doing with the AI and with that chat support in one capacity or another, so that you can refine how you’re questioning, you know what to look for if there’s an issue, and it can help you think through the challenges as well as operate as a brainstorming tool.

I also use it to create marketing. I work in the sales and marketing space, and so say, “Here’s my core competitors. Help me define how I stand out, given what you know from these three documents.” It’s very good at doing stuff like that. You always have to refine, but it’s very good at doing that sort of stuff.

I love to hear it. Good for you. No wonder one of the reasons you’re so successful.

Answering Rapid-Fire Questions

Thank you. We’re working hard here. I have a few rapid-fire questions. What do you think is the biggest mistake that small businesses make when it comes to climate risks? I want top of mind, not a long answer.

They don’t assume that the future looks different than the past. They assume that if they’ve been hit once, they’ll never be hit again.

Small businesses that fail do not assume that the future looks different than the past. They assume that they will never be hit again by the same problem.

That speaks to gambling. It’s like people think if they win once, they’re going to win again.

It’s nature casino out there. Don’t play with it.

What’s one low-cost step that every small business can take now to become more resilient?

Go to Realtor.com and type in your address for your business, and you’ll see maps that identify your business. If you click on that map, it’ll identify the environmental risks that are around that property. Your flood risk, your air quality risks, your wildfire risk, and noise, which isn’t climate-related. Knowing those three things, flood, wildfire, and air quality can be important for figuring out what some of the next steps you should take are.

How can resilience give small businesses a competitive advantage?

I’m so glad you asked, because resilience is not just a burden. It is a competitive advantage. Number one, you might be able to reopen more quickly than your competitors. You might be the only thing that reopens. Your community feels excited about you, and they give you a lot of love, including more revenue for that. The idea of being ready means that you are also going to be ready for more revenue, and that is fundamental to the resilience advantage.

On to number four. What role does community play in helping small businesses survive climate disasters?

First, I’m going to think about community from the perspective of the big financial services community. One thing is that insurers, investors, and regulators are all looking for resilience signals right now. They may not yet be looking down at the level of a small business, but they are absolutely looking at all those things that small businesses influence, like economies, for one. The small business is at the heart of the US economy, and large businesses that are relying on these small businesses.

Keep in mind that when you build resilience, you are helping the overall ecosystem to be better off from the perspective of insurers, investors, and regulators, and fight for what you deserve, therefore, because of that. In terms of community, I will say that it warms my heart when, after a major storm event that might be in the news for you and me, even though I’m in Chicago and you’re in California, and maybe it’s a Northeast thing or it’s a Florida thing, so frequently, we do not hear about the small businesses reopening.

However, there they are. If you scan the background on the news, she’s pushing the water out the front door of her store, she’s turning the closed sign to open, she’s boarding up the window, and she’s making a go of it. Her community is saying, “Good job.” To me, that is an incredibly important part of what community is. We’re there for one another. It’s so different. I know you talked about COVID. It is like COVID, and we’re out for helping one another, but it’s so physical that the visual clue that says, “We’re back in business,” can be extraordinarily powerful.

On the heels of that, if a small business owner is facing one of these challenges and they feel truly overwhelmed, where would you recommend they start?

Number one, know that they’re not alone. We wrote The Resilience Advantage so they could feel as though they had a heart that was beating alongside them to get this stuff done. It all starts with one step. If you can crack open that book to the chapter that you think is probably most relevant to you, wildfire, flooding, or tornado, I think that is important.

Don’t be seized by the fact that there’s so much to do. There’s one thing to do. You take one step. We talked earlier about plans. It could be almost free except for your time. Having a plan so that your colleagues know when to evacuate and where to go could be literally the difference between life and death.

Knowing that and you hold that in your arms like, “I’m a small business owner and I actually hold the key to the life and death of my staff,” can feel very powerful. While it can be immobilizing to face these major threats, doing something about it gives us a mighty sense of like, “I’m going to survive and thrive in the face of this big disruption.”

You might also simply recommend that they pick up your book, and I will say they can find The Resilience Advantage and free tools that you also created to help businesses start this journey at ClimateResilienceConsulting.com. As a final reflection, I’d love to ask you one last question. If you could leave small business owners with one action to take, perhaps outside of visiting ClimateResilienceConsulting.com to begin building their resilience advantage, what would it be?

Take a picture. It’s timestamped. By the way, your phone does timestamping now. If you’re taking it on your phone, you’re in good shape. Take a picture of every physical asset that you rely on for your business and file it in the cloud. You’ll never regret it. It will take you, depending upon the size of your business, fifteen minutes or a couple of hours, but it will pay back in the long run.

I think that applies to everybody who owns a home as well. Go around your home, take a video of it. I’ve heard the same story from so many that we’re trying to get claims exercised for their fire insurance. Documenting your valuables is incredibly important. Thank you so much for joining me, Joyce. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I think we’ve helped a lot of people.

You are a great helper, no doubt. Corinna, you are such an amazing leader. I appreciate having the chance to talk with you. Thank you very much.

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Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

Thank you, all, for tuning into this conversation with Joyce Coffee. I hope it leaves you inspired to think about resilience in perhaps a new way, not just as survival, but as an advantage, a way to strengthen our businesses, our communities, and our shared future, even just for our family and our homes. If you are ready to take the first step, check out Joyce’s book, The Resilience Advantage, available now, and explore the free tools on her website.

Go to ClimateResilienceConsulting.com. Remember, every time you subscribe to this show or our newsletter at CareMoreBeBetter.com, we plant a tree through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org. With your help, we’ve already planted over 27,000 trees in 2025 alone, and we’re just getting started. Together, we can care more, we can be better, and we can build a resilient future. Thank you.

• Joyce Coffee on LinkedIn
• Climate Resilience Consulting
• The Resilience Advantage: A Small Business Guide To Preparing For Floods, Heat Waves, Wildfires, and Other Climate Disasters
• Realtor.com®
• ForestPlanet