A written plan for carrying on when something stops you working, built in a half-day workshop with the people who would actually be holding it, then tested with a tabletop disaster exercise.
Price: From £850. Half-day workshop, the written plan, and a review a year later.
How long: Two to three weeks from workshop to finished plan. Who it is for: Businesses asked for a plan by a client, an insurer or a tender, and anyone whose honest answer to "what would we do?" is a shrug.
Most small businesses have a plan of sorts. It lives in the owner’s head, it quietly assumes the owner is available, and it has never been said out loud. That holds up right until the morning it has to, which tends to be the morning the owner is on a plane.
A continuity plan is not a binder. It is a short document saying what you cannot afford to lose, how long you could cope without it, who decides, and who to ring. Ours run to a handful of pages, because a plan nobody has read is worth nothing at eight in the morning with the shutters down.
Not everything you do: the handful of things that start hurting within days. We put an honest recovery time against each one, which usually turns out to be sooner than it feels, and write down what each depends on. Which system, which supplier, which person, which key.
Done with the people who would be holding the plan, not just whoever signs the invoice. What could stop us, what we already do about it, and what we would actually do. Most of the value is in the room: this is usually where somebody discovers three people each thought a fourth had the backups.
You get a plan in plain English: critical activities, recovery times, who can invoke it, the first hour, contacts, what goes in the emergency pack and a log to fill in as things happen. Plus a copy that lives somewhere other than the building it describes.
A plan that has never been rehearsed is a guess. We run it as a tabletop disaster exercise and fix what the exercise breaks, then come back a year later, or sooner if something has actually happened.
Writing one does not make you resilient. A plan is a decision made calmly in advance, nothing more. It does not get your data back, which is backups you have actually tested restoring, and it does not replace insurance. It also goes stale: the contact list is wrong within a year, every time. We would rather sell you a short plan you use and revisit than a long one that impresses a tender panel and then sits in a drawer.
Download the free template: Our six-page continuity plan template is free, needs no email address, and is yours to fill in without us. If you get through it on your own, good. If you reach "how long could we cope without this?" and realise nobody actually knows, that is the conversation worth having.