August 24, 2008

We have moved into our temporary space at 128 E State Street (Suite 200) and are more or less back to normal. The unplanned move was time consuming and stressful but we worked through it and are looking forward. We have continued to meet with our builder, architect and engineers and will move forward with our building addition as soon as possible. We hope to have construction completed by the end of April 2009 so that we may move back across the street to our building at 115 South Broad Street. Construction will take six months so we expect to be in our temporary space for the coming tax season.

This has been an "interesting" experience. We have learned a lot about disaster recovery and preparedness. The theoretical "building burns down" scenario that is often talked about in disaster planning can take on many forms. The impact to the business can be minimized with proper planning.

We have spent the past five years transforming our business from being very paper dependent to a more electronic image based workflow and storage. Our reason for doing this was to increase our efficiency and to be better able to respond to clients. In retrospect (hindsight is always 20/20) this change had a very significant impact on our disaster recovery. Our servers were relocated by 8am the next morning and our team members had secure remote access to the firm's calendars, contact management, client files and all of our software programs. The only paper files that were not immediately available were files that had been dropped off by clients and not yet imaged and some engagements that were in process.

We were able to respond to client inquiries and function without missing a day. Of course the efficiency or working remotely and the time required to sort through our offices, pack, move, unpack, etc. was very time consuming and took our focus and attention for a couple of weeks.

In many ways the unplanned move forced us to reorganize, shred old files, and clean. I don't think we could have ever accomplished so much in such little time if it were not forced upon us. As with many things, what does not kill us makes us stronger. We have survived, and I believe that at the end of this process we will be better for it.

Kindest regards,

Bill Fenstermacher, Jr & Chad Fenstermacher
— on behalf of Fenstermacher & Company

Click here to view photos