Business Continuity Plans

Create a Business Continuity Plan

As a small business owner, you appreciate the necessity of thoughtful planning and strategizing. A business continuity plan can help your company endure and survive an unexpected crisis or event that temporarily closes your business. 

• Keep the plan simple and easy to follow. 
• Do a risk assessment of the potential threats your business faces and outline the steps to be taken in different situations. 
• Create a list of actions to take on each potential risk.
• Detail what to do, who should do it, and how. 
• Have contact information for all employees, business partners and providers, and emergency responders in your community. 
• Identify another location to run your business if you need to vacate your commercial property temporarily.
• Once your plan is drafted, print three copies and store them in secured locations elsewhere (a fireproof safe, your home, and a business partner’s or trusted friend’s place). Maintain a digital copy stored in the cloud that you and your employees can access on mobile devices or laptops.

Continuity plans include: 

A Communications Strategy

Communication is critical for informing employees, suppliers, and customers during a crisis. Draft a crisis communications plan as part of your disaster recovery strategy. Include an updated emergency contact list with every possible way of reaching each employee by phone, email, and social media. Think of how you’ll inform employees, customers, partners, and suppliers, for instance, by email or text messages. 

Think about the messaging you need to have in place for communicating to employees, partners and suppliers, customers, and the public. 

Remember that your cell phone service may not operate as smoothly during significant emergencies or natural disasters. It’s recommended to use non-voice channels for communications in an emergency, like texting, emailing, and social media channels, as they use less bandwidth than voice calls.

Identifying Your Company’s Mission-Critical Operations

As part of your business continuity plan, you’ll need to detail your company’s mission-critical systems. 

Think about your computing systems, servers, and software, and what to do if your network goes down and you have no internet access. That likely means you’ll need network documentation, like a blueprint of your company’s software, data, computing systems and hardware. Having network documentation will make restoring your network and critical systems faster, easier, and possibly cheaper. 

Also, establish the ability to remotely access your network so you and your staff can continue to manage the business online from wherever you are. If you have an IT technician on your team or an independent IT consultant who services your business, ensure they have remote access and are included in your network documentation and overall business continuity plan.

Training Your Employees

Ensure your employees know your business continuity plan and how to access it. Train them on what to do if you cannot be contacted and they need to execute the business continuity plan. 

Backing up Data

Always back up your data regularly and consistently and maintain copies on different servers at a secure, offsite location and in the cloud. Automating your data backups is wise, so you don’t need to worry about doing it yourself every day. 

Testing and Updating the Plan Annually

After creating a business continuity plan, test it at least annually and update it. Run different scenarios with your employees and partners to see how it works and to identify holes in the plan that must be addressed. Testing the plan will also help ensure your employees understand what they need to do in an emergency.