When speaking to small business owners, I often hear that a lot of them are aware of business continuity / resilience but don’t apply it to their own organisations.

Asked ‘why?’, their answer is invariably either ‘we can’t afford that’, ‘it’s too complex’, or ‘we don’t have time for that’.

Let’s look at that – and go beyond the old adage “if you think being resilient is expensive, try not being resilient.”

 

‘We can’t afford that’ and ‘It’s too complex’

Resilience does not need to be expensive. In most cases, the best solution is the simplest and cheapest solution.
When a fire department looked at building resilience for their IT dispatch system, they asked their pensioners how things worked before IT and simply brought back the paper-based system as a fall-back. It did involve training staff and regular exercises, but not a penny was spent on fancy equipment (beyond some pencils).

Look at your business and consider:

  1. What must we absolutely be able to keep doing to run our business (like actually dispatching fire engines as a fire department)?
  2. What could go wrong that would stop us from doing that?
  3. What can we do to avoid things failing in the first place?
  4. What do we do when things fail regardless?

A small company taking orders via email? Make sure orders are sent to a group inbox, so someone being ill or on holiday does not mean their emails won’t get read. Invest in a mobile data sim to keep things going when your broadband is down.

 

‘We don’t have time for that’

Apart from the fact that it will cost you a lot of time when things do fail, I would strongly suggest that you at least go through step 1 & 2 (above) and think about what could go wrong. It should not take you more than an hour to come up with a quick list, and you can then make an educated decision about how much time you should and want to invest in avoiding and preparing for these eventualities.

A few things to consider are:

  • Your own processes and technology
  • Your employees (and their absence)
  • Your clients and suppliers
  • The environment (e.g. natural disasters)

You can also look at your strategic resilience as opposed to purely operational resilience.

This means looking at the robustness of your business model and strategy and operational resilience the robustness of your operations, people and processes used to achieve that strategy / business model