It’s National Emergency Preparedness Month Are You Prepared? By now you’ve probably held your fire drill or tornado drill or other safety preparedness drills to keep your staff safe – and if you haven’t, you should! But in addition to that, have you considered making sure your business is kept safe and can resume operations …
September is National Emergency Preparedness Month Read More »
Yikes, it’s HOT!! Heat waves, heat warnings, power outages, lethargy. What’s a small business owner to do? Around here we’re used to going almost straight from winter to summer and then back again – spring and fall are short seasons. This past spring was all rain until we hit the heat warning days, with precious …
Many of us have had excess rain this year, accompanied by lightning! As I’m talking with customers this summer, it seems that this rain may never end. You may have had several opportunities so far to practice your bad-weather emergency plans with your staff. Hopefully you’ve noted down some of the following from those experiences: …
You may have seen the statistics – only 2 out of 3 businesses have a business continuity plan, and 90% of businesses without a plan will fail following a disaster. That’s a virtual guarantee of failure. You don’t want to be one of those businesses that failed simply because they didn’t give a little time …
5 Advantages of having a Business Continuity Plan Read More »
You might be lucky if: Despite a lack of a business continuity plan, you stay in business following a disaster – that would put you in a small group of 10%! You never have an electrical storm that affects the power in your area. You have never experienced even a mild electrical surge. The only …
If you just can’t spare the time to put together a full continuity plan, there are a few things you can do to pull together some basic pieces to tide you over until you can carve out some time to give it the proper attention. The following is a short outline to get your “quick and …
The 3-step “Quick and Dirty” Business Continuity Plan Read More »
In the Business Impact Analysis, you list the different functions of your business, and rank the function in terms of High, Medium, or Low impact on your business’s success (hint: if you mark any activity Low Impact, consider outsourcing it – it probably isn’t worth your time to do it yourself). Then consider how long …
The Risk Assessment Matrix should help you consider all the possible risks to your business and to evaluate each one based on its probability. Just because a certain risk isn’t likely isn’t a reason to ignore it in your plan, but it should be prioritized after the more likely scenarios are covered. By then, …
The BCP Document Outline provides a resource to ensure that you think about all the pieces you might need in your plan. This outline will also help you organize your thinking logically so that when someone needs to implement the plan, they can find all the appropriate resources for that particular event easily. …
If you have never put together a Business Continuity Plan, then the Getting Started Guide is the place to start. Use this resource in conjunction with the BCP Development Outline. These resources introduce several concepts and help you start to think about your business in those terms. A Recovery Time Objective is the amount of …
Getting Started with your Business Continuity Plan Read More »