If not, now is the time to figure out your Plan B.
Step 1: Inventory Critical Systems
Your business is more vulnerable than you realize. The first step in responding to any emergency is to know what is important. Make a list. Many owners and managers benefit from simply recording the critical systems.
When you make you list, some items to consider:
- Important files or programs
- Anything on a server
- Accounting or point-of-sale systems
- Phones and faxes -- both phone lines and phone systems
- Internet connection and electricity
- Roads -- what happens if the street in front of your business is closed?
- Suppliers -- how long can you survive without deliveries?
- Often overlooked: employees. What happens when key employees cannot come to work?
Step 2: Score Each System
Not all systems are created equal. There is a simple tool for ranking your systems: Likelihood-Impact-Risk.
What is the likelihood of system going down or being unavailable? Score it from 0 - 10. Then, if that system does become unavailable, what is the impact to your business. Score it from 0 - 10. Take the likelihood and the impact scores and multiply them together for the risk score. You might need to score each system multiple times -- once for each length of time it might be unavailable.
For example, if your organization has an ecommerce website which accounts for over half your business. You might score it as down for one hour, one day and one week.
- Likelihood of being down one hour: 8, down one day: 4, down one week: 1
- Impact of being down one hour: 3, down one day: 7, down one week: 10
- Risk score for one hour: 24, one day: 28, one week: 10.
Based on this example, you should first focus on what happens if your ecommerce site is down for one day, followed closely by one hour. Being down for a whole week may be disastrous but the odds of that happening are pretty low.
Step 3: Make Your Plan B
You now know what is important and in some ways this part is the easiest. Email can't get lost, sign-up for an email backup system. If you need near 100% up time of your Internet connection, get a backup connection.
Part of a successful Plan B is to document it and communicating it to your team, customers and suppliers. Do not keep it a secret!
Step 4: Test It!
Step 3 was the easiest, this Step 4 is the hardest. Test your Plan B. Pull the plug from your server or turn off the electricity to your facility. The wrong time to know your Plan B does not work is when you need it most.
When you test your system, make sure the people who will actually implement Plan B will be the ones testing it.
Conclusion
Most micro and small businesses have done little or no work on preparing for business interruptions or system failure so even if you only do the first step you will be far ahead of others. Take that step today.
