What should a small business actually prepare for, and what is business continuity planning?
Planning for how you would keep operating, or resume quickly, when something disrupts you — and for a small business the useful version is short, specific and focused on the handful of things that would genuinely stop you.
Why it is worth doing badly rather than not at all. Most small businesses that suffer a serious disruption have no plan, and the cost is rarely the incident itself — it is the days lost working out what to do while customers go elsewhere.
The method, stripped down:
Identify what you actually cannot operate without. Usually a short list: access to a system, a key supplier, one member of staff, a premises, or the ability to take payment.
For each, ask how long you could manage without it, which tells you what needs a plan and what does not.
Decide the workaround in advance, in enough detail to act on.
Write down who decides and who contacts whom.
The risks that actually hit small businesses:
Cyber incidents, particularly ransomware and business email compromise — the latter being the mundane, expensive one where an invoice is redirected.
Loss of a key person, through illness or departure. Key-person dependence is the most under-addressed risk in small business and needs documented processes, not just insurance.
Supplier failure, especially single-sourced items.
Premises loss — fire, flood, or loss of access.
Utility and IT outage.
Cash flow shock from a customer failing or paying late.
The specific things worth doing this week:
Test a backup restore. Backups that have never been restored are not backups, and this is the single most valuable hour available.
Hold key contacts offline, since a contact list inside the system that failed is useless.
Verify payment-detail changes by phone, using a known number — this defeats most invoice fraud.
Document the things only one person knows.
Check what your insurance actually covers, particularly business interruption and cyber, and what the exclusions are.
Name a deputy for each critical function.
General information, not legal or financial advice.