When you set out on the hopefully long journey that founding a business entails, you are naturally fired up with passion and excitement.
With so many tasks to juggle, it is easy for some vital preparations to get overlooked.
One of which is Business Continuity Planning. And if you do not have a plan in place, the repercussions for your business can be devastating.
What is Business Continuity Planning?
Quite simply, it is making sure that your business can continue to function effectively at a time of disruption. In that respect, 2020 has been a year to test any business like never before.
Disruption to a business inevitably comes out of the blue. It is hard enough getting a business established, and sadly, a failure to plan for unforeseen events can result in you going out of business before you ever stood a chance of making it thrive and grow.
Leaving Covid-19 aside, other potential threats to business continuity include cyber-attack, fire, floods, and terrorism. This is not to be alarmist, hopefully none of the above will ever affect you. But if major disruption strikes, you need to quickly protect your people and your assets and make sure you can maintain or resume your business processes. A Business Continuity Plan sets out the actions to take and the processes to follow if a major incident happens.
Remember, disruption comes in many guises. It is important to understand how the loss of finance, key team members, reputational factors and change in legislation will impact your business.
So, where to start?
To begin, make a list of your company’s key functions, such as HR, finance, sales and IT etc. Work out which functions are the most likely to disrupt the business if they are unable to operate, even for a day. Prioritise accordingly from the most to the least important. You now have concluded the basic research to enable you to come up with a Business Continuity Plan!
Plans are just plans. Disruption by its very nature is unpredictable so it is important to be flexible and agile: your plan may require adapting according to circumstances. Look upon it as a guideline for how to respond when the problem first arises.
Ensure that the completed plan is available both on your systems and in a hard copy format, as your IT infrastructure might not be functioning. Ensure that your plan is distributed to key employees in both formats, so everyone is aware of their responsibilities when the crisis strikes.
The 5 key steps for building Business Continuity Plans
1. Describe how potential threats could damage your operation
Like health and safety, this is a risk assessment where you identify which interruptions your business may face. If your business lies in IT, cyber-attack or Ransomware will be critical. If your premises are low-lying and on a flood plain, weather events will be significant. Each business will have its own unique risks.
2. Establish procedures and safeguards to mitigate the identified risks
This is where you apply risk management to your key business functions. It is good practice to list all critical equipment, key supplies, data, and data back-up.
Make sure you have an up-to-date contact list for key personnel, the continuity team (see below), key customers and suppliers.
If your IT systems are not fully in the Cloud, make sure you keep back-ups offsite and you can access these when disruption strikes.
Think about your communications strategy. How will you communicate with your team, your customers, and suppliers? What channels will you use and how quickly can you manage any reputational risk? Do you have call forwarding in place and how will you maintain service levels?
How quickly can you resume business operations? Can you work from home or do you need to find alternative business accommodation?
Get a central password manager in the Cloud, make sure you include your key logins such as HMRC, payroll and companies house; and of course, ensure there is always an authority available for bank payments.
Keep the plan brief and ideally in checklist format. This will make it easy to use in an emergency and gives you a fighting chance of managing the disruption successfully.
3. Create a Business Continuity Team
These are your key responders when disruption strikes. It is vital that they are comprehensively trained in all aspects of the plan so each knows their responsibility when the time comes. The team can liaise between all the personnel required to keep the business running, so have a critical role to perform.
This could be the removal of documents or systems to a safe location in the event of fire or organising a clean-up of the premises in the event of flood. In effect they are your company’s paramedics, there to keep things functioning, so choose your best people for the job!
4. Make sure it works – test it!
If you do not test your plan, you can never be certain it will have a chance of working when needed. Only by deliberately trying to break the plan can you see if it will work when it needs to.
Start by having a table-top exercise where the entire plan can be put under the microscope to make sure all procedures and business functions are included.
Next comes the structured walk-through. The continuity team members follow their allocated sections of the plan according to the types of potential disasters outlined. They question the steps to identify weaknesses.
Missing elements or deficiencies in the walk-through should be corrected and updated.
An emergency evacuation drill is the next step in the process, this will enable the continuity team to note how it progresses and amend and update the plan in the light of any deficiencies identified.
Finally, the most drastic testing of all, the disaster simulation test. Simulate a disaster as if it was actually happening, carry out your processes and see if your business is able to cope in the event of the real thing.
Test your plan regularly, at least twice per year, and use different scenarios to see if your plan is robust.
5. Review and update
Make sure you have a full de-brief after your business continuity plan test. Shortfalls need to be identified and the plan updated accordingly, with copies of the revised version given to all appropriate parties.
And finally, a word about engagement
Your plan should be a working document. For it to truly work, all staff members need to buy into it, so make sure that everyone at all levels are involved and are given the chance to contribute and be a part of it.
At the beginning of the year, many would doubtless have dismissed the notion of business contingency planning as scaremongering, but if we can learn anything from this year, it is that when times are uncertain you need to take every precaution available to ensure your business continues when disaster strikes.
For further advice on this and any matter relating to the growth and nurturing of start-up businesses, the team at FinFlare will be pleased to help.
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