Use our business continuity plan template when you need to assure that no matter what, your company will continue to perform under any circumstance. When creating any business plan, you must always consider complicated situations that can put your company at risk; this is why having continuity management is a must.
As a business owner, you need to formulate a plan so that you can maintain operations even when unexpected disasters occur. This is because your insurance covers not all damages. Plus, disturbances in operations can negatively affect customer satisfaction, which will then likely impact your income.
No matter the size of a business, there are unforeseen circumstances that can affect your operations if you don't prepare ahead of time. To ensure that you can minimize damages and continue operations despite these circumstances, you need a plan. To be specific, here are a few reasons why a business continuity plan is important:
When disaster strikes, you can't expect your personnel to know what to do in the situation without having a concrete plan that came directly from you, the owner. One of the reasons why you need to create an effective business plan is to organize your staff when unforeseen circumstances happen. You can use the plan to train them so that they are always prepared even when you are not physically present at the time of the incident.
As mentioned earlier, not all damages from unforeseen circumstances are covered by your insurance. For example, if there is an outbreak in your warehouse that causes most of your employees to miss a few days of work (which then affects production, distribution, customer satisfaction and retention, etcetera), the loss in income might not be covered by your policy. With your plan, you are able to prepare your finances when such a thing happens.
Because unforeseen circumstances and disasters affect the entire company, you need to be able to present your plan to stakeholders so that they can have confidence that you are prepared no matter what happens. But how do you present your plan effectively?
To help you organize your ideas in the presentation, you can use our template. Here is what you're getting:
A simple title page will set the tone for your presentation. It should be clean, simple and professional since you are presenting an important aspect of your business.
Begin your presentation with an overview of your insurance policy. What type of coverage do you have? What circumstances are covered by your policy? Any important information that will affect your plan should be presented in this slide.
After laying out the details of your insurance policy, dive straight into your instructions of how you're using the business continuity plan. What kind of circumstances require it? What should be the plan of action when such circumstances occur?
Of course, you want your senior management to approve your business continuity plan because they will be enacting it when disasters occur. Therefore, you want them to be fully knowledgeable about the plan, and you also want to make sure that they agree with it.
This portion discusses in more detail what your plan is about. You need to include 1) the type of incidents that could launch the plan, 2) your emergency response and management, 3) your plan reviews and maintenance, and 4) how you plan to send notifications regarding an incident affecting the site.
In your solution design, you need to discuss in more detail how you're planning to execute your plan. This includes 1) how to decide on a course of action, 2) checklists and flow diagrams, and 3) a list of key vendors, stakeholders, regulators and other third parties that may be affected by the situation. By creating a concrete solution design, your management staff and personnel will know exactly what to do in case of a crisis.
After analyzing your plan and creating a solution design, you need to test them so that you can get organizational acceptance. In this portion of the presentation, you need to lay out three important things: 1) the emergency action steps that are needed to be taken in case of an incident, 2) your business recovery phase, and 3) your recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, both in the near term and long term.
Lastly, present to your stakeholders the key business processes that you're prioritizing to protect when you implement your plan. This and all the other aspects of the plan, you can find in our business continuity plan template so that you can present your ideas in a clear and organized manner.
