It’s what you think about when you can’t sleep. It’s the number one threat to your business. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
What is it?
Simple: it’s any disruption to your business continuity.
Simply put, if your business can’t operate, then it can’t bring in any revenue. And chances are, even when you’re not operating you still have significant amounts of overhead and fixed costs that you have to pay regardless. So what’s the effect on your business’s bottom line?
Not good.
In this article, we’ll help you deal with any threats that come up to your business’s revenue-generating capacity by teaching you how to create a business continuity plan that will help mitigate such risks.
Resilience
The first key element of a business continuity plan is developing resilience. What is resilience?
In a nutshell, resilience is all about preventing business disruption. It’s about putting safeguards and guardrails in place to prevent your business from ever having to shut down no matter what goes on in the world or market.
Of course, there’s no way to build a resilience plan that is 100% airtight. But even so, you can still build small amounts of resilience in different ways that add up to increased protection for your company’s revenues.
One example of building resilience could be having multiple suppliers for your business’s products. That way, even if one supplier goes under, your business doesn’t have to pause operations because it has other suppliers still bringing product in.
Recovery
The recovery element of business continuity plans is all about figuring out how to come back from a time when business continuity has to be paused. Take, for instance, a situation where a fire burns your place of business down.
There’s no way around it — your business is going to have to pause. But the impact of the pause on your bottom line can be reduced if you have a strong recovery plan in place to pick things back up as soon as possible, for instance with PPP loan forgiveness.
Business continuity planning is not complete without a good recovery strategy in place for all different kinds of risks.
Contingency
Last but not least, you should also build contingencies into your business continuity plan. These go hand in hand with recovery strategies.
Take, for instance, the previous example where a company’s place of business where all transactions are done burns down. A contingency plan could be to immediately move sales to an online format so that the company doesn’t have to entirely pause operations.
Having these contingency plans in your back pocket can help you come out of a disaster even faster than when you just have recovery strategies in place.
Build a Business Continuity Plan ASAP
There you have it. Now that you know how to build a business continuity plan, be sure to take some time as soon as possible to think through resilience, recovery, and contingency strategies for your company.
For more business advice, be sure to take some time to check out the rest of the website!
