On this week’s episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser takes a look at small business continuity planning

Inspired by a question from Meg Cumby, in this episode we discuss the consequences of disruptions for small businesses, disaster recovery challenges, evaluating risks to your business, and small business continuity planning expectations.

 

Episode Transcript – Small Business Continuity Planning

Hi everyone, welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast.

This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath.

On this week’s episode, we’ll be talking about small business planning and preparedness for disasters and disruptions. This is a topic that came up in a recent discussion on an online entrepreneur business owner forum that I’m a part of, and I asked for some questions that folks wanted to get answers to related to this topic, and my friend Meg Cumby had this specific question: What process should a small business, a one to five-person business, go through in order to evaluate and plan for disruption and disasters, and how often should you re-evaluate those risks or update your plans?

You can learn more about Meg and her business at megcumby.com. Her business is Meg Cumby Consulting: Where you can get client testimonials and case studies without the awkwardness.

So let’s take a look at Meg’s question and unpack this.

Certainly, a lot of our previous episodes have dealt with business continuity and crisis management planning and talking about enterprise risks really on a very large scale. We’ve talked about Fortune 500 organizations and the complexity of managing global operations and dealing with disasters and disruptions, but let’s bring this down to the small business level where you don’t have the resources and time to do the type of planning that a General Motors or a Merc or a 3M might have to do.

First, I think we can really simplify what we’re looking to plan around by looking at the consequences of disruptions that might impact the business.

And this is where I like to think about the four areas of consequence that happen when a disruption hits a business of any size, and those consequences are the loss of the team, the loss of the folks that do the work, the loss of the technology that the business is reliant upon, the loss of the facility that the work is conducted in … Where the work happens, in other words … and then finally, the loss of third-party services that you rely upon.

There’s another factor that can come into play with small businesses in terms of consequence, and that has to do with if you’re dependent upon a physical location because you are a restaurant or you are a small one- or two-location retail business, or you are a bar, for example. One of your dependencies that we can’t skip over is the need to have … the ability to reach the business. So you think about disruptions to transportation or lack of parking or lack of transit all suddenly become issues in those situations because you’re not able to reach the business.

Just this morning on the StarTribune … The Twin Cities newspaper, or one of the Twin Cities newspapers here in Minnesota … one of the more famed bars in Minneapolis is closing because they’re losing their parking lot. The parking lot is actually owned by the city of Minneapolis, and the city is taking the parking lot away from the business. They’ve been operating on this handshake agreement for years, apparently. They’re taking the parking lot in order to have a staging area for construction of a new rail line, a light rail transit line that’s being built here.