Business Continuity

Operations: Deliver and run the business

Think about the last time something went wrong in your business on a day you weren’t ready for it. A truck wouldn’t start. A supplier stopped answering. The person who knew the password was on vacation. Many owners have a story like this, and many of us handled it by scrambling.

Business continuity is the plan you make while everything is calm, so that the scramble is shorter and less expensive. Skip the thick binder. For a small business it is a few honest answers to one question: if this one thing disappears tomorrow, what happens on Thursday?

Three things that can go missing

There are three failures worth planning for, and they are different from each other. The owner can become unavailable. A supplier can fail you. A critical system can stop working. Each one breaks a different part of the business, so each needs its own answer.

Start with you. If you were out for two weeks, with no warning, who would answer the phone, schedule the crews, approve purchases and sign the checks? We see this constantly with owner-operators: every important decision lives in one head, and every important login lives on one phone. The business looks solid until the day that head or that phone is unavailable. Where are your passwords, your account numbers and your key contacts written down, and does anyone besides you know where to find them? This connects directly to the lesson on Delegation and Owner Bottlenecks. A bottleneck is an inconvenience on a normal day and a crisis on a bad one.

Now the supplier. Which single vendor, if they went silent, would stop you from delivering? A contractor who buys all materials from one yard, a restaurant with one produce source, a retailer with one wholesaler. You do not need a backup for everything. You need to know which two or three suppliers are truly critical, and have the name and a first conversation with an alternate. That is covered in more detail in Vendor and Supplier Management.

Then the systems. Your phone line, your scheduling tool, your accounting file, your website, your payment processing. Ask of each one: if it stopped working this morning, how would I still take an order, serve a customer and get paid? Sometimes the honest answer is a paper form and a phone call, and that is a perfectly good answer as long as you decided it before the outage rather than during it. For each system, also ask where the backup is and when you last checked that it works, especially for your accounting file and your customer list.

Write the one-page plan

For each of the three, write down four things: what breaks first, who does what in the first 24 hours, what you need to have on hand, and who you call. Keep it to one page. A plan that runs to thirty pages will never be opened, and this one has to be usable by someone who is stressed and in a hurry. The same thinking behind procedures people will actually use applies here.

Money is the fourth thing, and it quietly sits under all the others. Every recovery costs something, whether it is a rush order, a temp, a repair or a few slow weeks. Say you run a landscaping company and some Fridays you struggle to pay your crew because there is no reserve. Put a share of every job into a separate account, and a surprise becomes an expense instead of an emergency. That is the practical role of cash in continuity, and Building a Cash Reserve goes through how to build it. A continuity plan without a cash cushion is a plan you cannot afford to carry out.

Your next step

Take one sheet of paper and write three headings: Me, My critical supplier, My critical system. Under each, answer in two or three sentences what happens if it disappears tomorrow and who you would call first. Then put the passwords, account numbers and key contacts somewhere secure that one trusted person knows how to reach.

What it costs

The one-page plan takes about two to three hours. Gathering logins and contacts into a secure place takes another hour or two. The conversations with your insurance agent and an attorney are the parts that cost money, and the price varies widely by area, so ask for a quote before you book anything. Building the cash cushion takes months, which is why it is worth starting first.