The 72 Hours Before Landfall: What to Automate First When a Storm's in the Forecast

The cone shifts overnight. A storm that looked like a maybe on Monday is now pointed at Carteret County, and you’ve got about three days.

This is when the prep you did in June either pays off or gets forgotten. You wrote the templates. You set up the booking pause. But with plywood to cut and a family to get squared away, it’s easy to lose an hour on the wrong thing. Having the tools ready is half of it. The other half is knowing what order to use them in when there’s no time to think.

Why the order matters

On a normal week it doesn’t much matter which task you knock out first. Storm week is different. If you spend an hour on a nice Facebook graphic before you’ve even decided whether you’re closing, that’s an hour you needed for something else.

So here’s the order I’d work in.

The list

1. Decide whether you’re closing, and say so. It doesn’t have to be final or polished. “Closing Thursday through the weekend for storm prep, details to follow” posted now is worth more than a perfect announcement six hours from now, when everyone’s attention has moved on.
2. Pause new bookings. If you take reservations or appointments, freeze the affected dates before the phone starts ringing. If you built a hold or pause ahead of time, this should take a couple of clicks.
3. Update your Google Business Profile. Set special hours or mark yourself temporarily closed. It takes two minutes, and it’s what a lot of people will see when they search your name.
4. Contact the people already booked. Send your rebooking template to everyone in the closure window. One message to a list beats twenty separate texts typed in a hurry.
5. Secure the building. By now the customer side is handled. You can board up and move equipment without that nagging feeling that someone’s about to show up to a locked door.
6. Everything else. The graphic, the longer post, the website banner. Do them if there’s time. Skip them if there isn’t.

The logic is simple. Handle what a customer is depending on right now before you handle polish. A missing closure notice costs someone a wasted drive. A plain-looking post costs nothing.

Plan for the storm that turns

Tracks move a lot in the last few days. You may work through this whole list and then watch the storm slide offshore. That’s fine. Closing when you didn’t have to looks a lot better than staying open through one that hit.

Two things help here. First, put a line in your closure post like “we’ll update here as the forecast gets clearer.” That gives you room to reopen early without looking like you can’t make up your mind. Second, keep a “we’re reopening” template next to the closure one. You’ll want to get that word out just as fast.

Tell your staff first

Everything above is about customers, but your people need to know too. Who’s covering what? Who’s helping secure the shop before they go take care of their own house?

Set up a group text for your crew before the season starts, not in the middle of a scramble. And tell staff the closure decision before you post it. Nobody should find out from a customer forwarding your Facebook post.

Run it once before you need it

Do a dry run on a calm day. You don’t have to close. Just walk the list and confirm each step works: the login still works, the template is where you left it, the booking pause does what you think it does.

A system nobody has tested usually has some small snag in it. You want to find that in July, not with a storm eighteen hours out.

Keep a paper copy

Save this order somewhere you can find it without searching, like a shared note or wherever your other storm templates live. Print one too. A dead phone or a power outage shouldn’t be what stands between you and the next step.

When the cone starts pointing your way, work down the list instead of reacting to whatever feels loudest. If you’d like help getting the booking pause, templates, and rebooking messages set up ahead of time, that’s the kind of thing we do in our business process automation work. The goal is that the only decisions left during those 72 hours are the ones that need you.