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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Five Stages of Business Growth (25-slide PowerPoint presentation). This presentation introduces a framework for entrepreneurs to use when building and navigating their business from a nascent, startup state to an enterprise with a global footprint. This framework, called the 5 Stages of Business Growth, is based on the fact that all businesses experience common [read more]
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You might turn on the local news at any time of the day, and you can see a weather report. Maybe you’re looking at cloudy skies or brisk winds, or maybe there’s something more noteworthy going on, like a tornado warning. We’ve reached the point in history where you likely take the weather reports for granted.
What makes those reports possible? Weather radar technology is most of why you can see whether it’s going to rain in a few hours, or snow, or whatever else is coming your way. If you don’t watch the local news, you can also get that info by glancing at your smartphone’s weather app. Most of them come with one built in these days.
If you’re running a business, weather radar technology might matter a lot more to you than you realize. Let’s talk about some ways this tech can help your company succeed and even thrive.
Weather radar technology advances each passing year. At one point, it might have told you that it may rain sometime in the next few hours. Now, it has reached the point where it can tell you that the rain will come in precisely twenty-two minutes, and it will last for an hour and a half from that point forward.
That’s incredible precision. Every once in a while, weather conditions change on a dime, and even the most advanced radar technology can make a mistake. However, it’s more dependable now than it ever was in the past.
If you have a business where you run an outdoor booth, you can use that info to decide whether it’s worth it to showcase what you have for sale outside on a particular day. For instance, in New York City, holiday markets happen in Columbus Circle. The companies who rent booths there pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege.
If you know that a violent snowstorm is coming, you’ll know that means it’s highly unlikely you’ll get much foot traffic that day. You’ll also know that if you try to set up your wares, the high winds or snow might damage them. You can save yourself money, time, and the effort it would take to set up your booth by keeping an eye on the radar technology and what it tells you.
As someone running a company, you can use weather radar technology to determine whether to set up a food truck on a particular day. If you know that it’s going to rain heavily one day, you’ll know not to drive the truck and park it next to an office building where you usually sell your burgers or tacos.
If you’re going to transport a shipment for your company, you’ll want to watch the radar weather report to see if violent storms will impede your ability to get from one place to another. If you have the kind of business where you move from town to town, knowing when damaging or dangerous weather will appear can impact whether you choose to remain where you are for a few extra hours.
If you run a lawn mowing or landscaping service, you’ll know certain days are off-limits based on the radar weather forecast. If you have a truck and plow driveways in the winter, you’ll know you will have a busy night ahead if you see that there’s a big storm moving in with some lake effect snow.
If you run a farmer’s market booth, you will know to stay behind at the farm rather than driving your corn or apples to the usual site. With bad weather approaching, you’ll waste a day if no one shows up to buy.
You might own a restaurant that has an outdoor section. It could do big business for you during the summer months, but not if you’re going to have thundershowers all day. You will know not to open up the patio section, and you can call some of your servers and tell them that you won’t need them that day.
Many other businesses can tell how to operate based on radar weather forecasts. Every once in a while, you might have one that misfires, but for the most part, they are extremely accurate these days. As someone running their own company, you can take full advantage of that.
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