By Rose Marie Quintos
According to Yelp.com’s Local Economic Impact Report,
more than 97,966 businesses have permanently shut down
during the pandemic.
Would your organization know what to do in times of natural disasters, cyber-attacks, fires, theft, accidents, or illness? Are you confident that you prepared for different crises that could affect your business?
The COVID-19 pandemic shows just how vulnerable a large of businesses were. A 2020 survey by Mercer found that 51% of companies across the globe don’t have a business continuity plan. From temporary business closures, some of the businesses especially the small ones are turning into permanent closure. What’s the problem? Aside from the pandemic itself, it’s the lack of preparation, a carefully planned and predefined BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
Business Continuity Plan is essential and critical for both small and large businesses.
While, Disaster recovery plan lays out the steps a business should take in the immediate wake of an emergency or disaster to prevent further damage and quickly recover as soon as possible. And Business Continuity Management refers to the entire program, to include planning, training and maintenance. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) refers to the written document that maps your anticipated threats and responses. (Island, J. 2021)
Business Continuity Plan typically contain a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, data backups and backup site locations. BCP can also identify plan administrators and include contact information for emergency responders, key personnel and backup site providers. It may provide detailed strategies on how business operations can be maintained for both short-term and long-term outages. (IBM Services, 2020).
Why have a Business Continuity Plan?
To protect your business against costly downtime
Without a business continuity plan, your business can lose customers and suffer damages to its facilities. Such loses will negatively impact your cash flow, creating more cost than revenue. In addition, insurance will probably not cover the indirect damages of an incident, such as loss of market share, loss of customers, and operational setbacks.
Remember also that your fixed costs will continue during and after an event, whether your business is open or not. The faster your organization can return to business as usual, the more likely it will fully recover from a crisis.
Having a Business Continuity Plan helps strengthen the safety and security in your organization.
To better preserve your corporate reputation, image, and value
Aside from loss of income and other negative impacts, crises and unplanned events could also result in hasty decisions and plans. And that could also affect your corporate reputation, image and value.
A predefined business continuity plan will help your organization eliminate the need to make hasty decisions in times of crisis.
To build resilience to your business
Crises and disasters can effortlessly destroy and disrupt your business, but a thorough plan, and comprehensive business continuity, can mitigate and minimize the losses and negative impacts in your organization. It can also help your business keep operating, gain customers, and earn revenue during and after the crises.
A BCP will also help document procedures before the unanticipated events. In this way, you can give BCP training and knowledge to the employees or staff of your business, and they will be more prepared and can make wise decisions in times of emergency.
The efforts and time you exert developing and polishing your business continuity plan is time you spend investing in your company.
“Even if [a crisis] does not visit you early on, take heart in knowing that the time you spent preparing for the worst is not wasted; your business continuity preparations are also opportunities to fine-tune your truly essential business processes, and identify company fat you can shed.”
-Jacques Island, Your Plan is Your Parachute
Learn more about the types and examples of crises and the crisis management cycle that can be applied to overcome one in our book Your Plan is Your Parachute: A Simplified Guide to Business Continuity and Crisis Management by Jacques Island
Rose Marie Quintos is a Publishing Assistant and the Marketing Director for Quest Publishing,a division of the Inquesta Corporation. (She can be reached at rquintos@inquesta.com.)
Sources:
Your Plan is Your Parachute: A Simplified Guide to Business Continuity and Crisis Management
https://www.startuploans.co.uk/business-advice/business-continuity-plan-examples/
https://home.akitabox.com/blog/importance-of-business-continuity-plan
https://invenioit.com/continuity/business-continuity-statistics/
https://www.ibm.com/in-en/services/business-continuity/plan
