Business Continuity Tools, Knowledge, And Experience For Small Businesses
BCP or Business Continuity Plans are viewed as a little bit of black magic or only for “big business”. If anything, BCPs are more important for a small business or start-up that doesn’t have a war chest of cash or customers to fall back on. Maybe it should be called your Business Continuing Plan?
BCP companies know all about making the sacrifices to ensure business runs as smoothly as possible. As with all small businesses, you learn to leverage as many freeware tools that you can get your hands on. In the case of BCP, here are two of the best. One gives you the knowledge and the other gives you the actual tool.
Knowledge
Continuing your business isn’t anything you aren’t used to on a regular basis. Unfortunately, during an incident that impacts your business, it isn’t a “regular basis”. So knowing what you’ll need, where to keep it (readily accessible), and how to execute it is going to require some planning. Before you start to back-up everything, take a step back and look at your daily requirements. How do you know when enough is enough? What situations might you find business in? Take some time to learn BCP in 14 simple 2-5 minute videos that show you the basics of BCP. This is where you’ll get all the knowledge you’ll ever need.
Experience
KingsBridge is a second-generation BCP company. It was started in 1983 by my dad, so I’ve had a lot of exposure to the business and the field my whole life. I started in BCP in 1999, so more than 20 of my 47 years have been spent working in BCP, day in and day out. Why am I telling you all this? I’m telling you this to help you understand my point about experience. While the books tell us all sorts of fundamentals, experience tells us a lot of those can be “shortcutted” into getting it done now. I’m not telling you to not stop at the stop sign; I am telling you nobody with any driving experience actually waits the “fundamental” 2 seconds. In the case of BCP, the fundamentals tell you to consider every threat; the experience tells you to worry about the results. Don’t worry, we wrote a post about it here so you can understand the entire concept.
Tools
“Always have the best tools for the job.” We’ve heard that since we tried using a screwdriver to nail two boards together! In order to reduce a “barrier to entry”, some BCP companies took their already simple and secure tools and made a free edition. For example, KingsBridge’s True, Shield – Free Edition doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that their Platinum (enterprise) level tool does. However, as a small business, you don’t “need” the $2,000 a month expense; you need the free tool to get your Business Continuing Plan written and ready for any sort of outage.
As you can probably tell from the above information, BCP isn’t a very difficult concept to understand. It’s just not well documented. It’s also a topic that nobody believes will happen to them and, as a result, they simply don’t want to do anything about it. Avoiding seems like a better solution. If recent times have taught us anything, it’s that, yes, it can happen to you. You might not have complete control over the aftermath, and it will be unfair, so you better be prepared!
About KingsBridge
KingsBridgeBCP offers BCP software solutions to businesses of all sizes and industry know-how based on best practices. To learn more about KingsBridge go to: https://www.kingsbridgebcp.com
