Business continuity plans: more necessary than ever

As small business owners, we have all faced many new challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. One of our initial challenges was to learn what seemed like a new language.
After we familiarized ourselves with the definitions of pandemic, essential-to-sustaining life business and social distancing, we then shifted our focus to the needs of our clients and employees. If your business was deemed by the governor’s office to be “essential-to-sustaining life” then it is likely your clients were asking you for a business continuity plan. If you are anything like me, I did not have a ton of experience in writing such a plan, so I had to self-educate.
Through my research, it appears that each business continuity plan must contain seven key elements. Here are just a few.
Establish a planning committee
Depending on the size of your company, your planning committee may include department heads, mid-level managers and supervisors. If you are a smaller company, your committee may include all employees.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
This process is used to identify, quantify and qualify the impact of a loss, interruption or disruption of the service your company provides. A BIA helps to identify mission-critical activities and the time frame within which they must be recovered. Explore all the risks your business is exposed to and the possible major disruptions that could occur.
Mitigate risks
Once you have completed the first two steps, the business owner should mitigate risks that threaten the health and safety of your business by reducing the risk to an acceptable level. Some strategies include vendor readiness and qualifying secondary suppliers, IT backup strategies, pre-purchasing of critical equipment, splitting critical functions and resources between multiple sites and cross-training personnel.
Establish business continuity strategies
Some areas you can establish strategies for include alternate work locations, cross-training, outsourcing, use of secondary suppliers, prioritization of customers, work-at-home strategies, mobile offices and manual procedures if computer systems go down.
Develop your plan
After recording everything in your business impact analysis, develop your plan for disasters and emergencies. At a minimum, your plan should include assumptions, goals and objectives, key roles and responsibilities, policy, purpose and scope, alternate operating strategies, supplier vendor readiness, business impact analysis results, and training, drills and exercises.
Implement and train
Conduct training for key employees with key roles and assignments in your business continuity process.
Test the plan
Exercise your strategies and plans by rehearsing with co-workers and testing all systems to demonstrate that your business will in fact be able to continue during a disaster or emergency. Your plan will probably look nice and pretty on paper, but you truly won’t know its effectiveness until you test it.

Finally, don’t forget about your suppliers. Could your business still operate if your top vendors closed? It’s critical that you consider the actions needed for your business to remain operational during a crisis. If you don’t ensure your mission-critical vendors have a business continuity plan, then you don’t really have a plan at all.

 

Dennis W. Lejeck is the president and founder of Black Knight Security. Dennis is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence and has also participated in the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® program. BKS was recognized in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 as one of the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in Pittsburgh.