Why one page beats a binder
Big companies write continuity plans that run to binders nobody opens during an actual crisis. A small business needs the opposite: one printed page answering, for a handful of likely scenarios, exactly three questions — who does what, using which backup system, within what time.
The four scenarios worth planning for are the ones that actually happen: the internet goes down, a key laptop dies, the office becomes inaccessible, and a main vendor or system goes offline. Notice what is not on the list — you do not need a plan for every disaster, because different disasters converge on the same responses. A fire and a burst pipe are both the office scenario. Ransomware and a crashed drive are both the laptop scenario. Plan the response, not the catalog of causes.
When the internet goes down
Decide now, in writing: phones become hotspots. Modern phone plans handle a day of tethered laptops for a small team, and knowing this in advance turns an outage into an inconvenience.
Your page should name: who calls the internet provider, with the account number printed right there; who switches the team to hotspots and in what order if data is limited; and which work is postponed versus continued — card payments at a counter, for instance, need their own line, because your payment terminal may have a cellular fallback you have never turned on. Target: functioning within 30 minutes.
Worth checking as you write this section: whether a second cheap internet line or a cellular backup router, 20 to 60 dollars a month, is justified. For a business taking payments in person, it usually is.
When a key laptop dies
The question this scenario really asks is: where does that person's work live? If the answer is on the laptop, no plan survives, so the plan starts before the failure: every machine backs up automatically, and files live in synced cloud folders, not local ones.
With that true, the page says: who holds the spare — a 500-dollar laptop in a drawer, set up and updated quarterly, is the cheapest continuity purchase there is; who can sign the person into their accounts, which is where a password manager with proper sharing earns its keep; and the target of working again within two hours.
Run the honest test now: if your bookkeeper's laptop drowned in coffee this morning, what exactly would be gone? If any answer is unclear, that is the gap to close this week.
When the office is inaccessible
Fire, flood, a burst pipe upstairs, a police closure of the block — the causes differ, the response is identical: everyone works from somewhere else. If your business is office work on cloud systems, this scenario is mostly about communication; if you serve customers in person, it is about a fallback location.
The page names: how the team is told, with a group text list printed on the page itself, since the phone tree in someone's head fails at 6am; where people work from, home by default, and for customer-facing businesses which nearby space or partner location is the fallback; who updates the website, voicemail, and Google listing so customers are not driving to a closed door; and who has copies of insurance and lease contacts — printed, because the scanned copy may be on a computer inside the building you cannot enter.
When a main vendor or system is offline
Your payment processor, your booking system, your supplier, your accounting platform — someday one of them will have an outage that is entirely out of your hands. The plan is about degrading gracefully instead of stopping.
For each of your two or three critical vendors, the page holds one line: the manual fallback, and the phone number. Card system down means a paper record of card numbers is never acceptable — the fallback is invoicing customers afterward, or an alternate payment method like a backup card reader from a second provider. Booking system down means a printed sheet of today's appointments, which implies someone exports or prints tomorrow's schedule each evening — a 60-second habit that buys a full day of function.
Also note each vendor's status page address, so you can confirm an outage is theirs in seconds instead of debugging your own systems for an hour.
Write it, print it, test it twice a year
- Book 90 minutes with whoever helps run the business and draft the four scenarios using the questions above. Plain language, names not job titles, phone numbers on the page.
- Print copies: one at the office, one at your home, one folded photo of it on each phone.
- Fix the gaps the writing exposed — usually backups, the password manager, and the spare laptop. The plan is only as real as those.
- Test twice a year, 30 minutes each: pick one scenario and walk it. Turn off the office Wi-Fi and watch what happens. Hand someone the spare laptop and time them to productive.
- Update the page when people or vendors change — a plan naming someone who left is worse than none, because it feels like coverage.
If the writing session surfaces technical gaps you want closed — backup testing, the password manager rollout, the cellular failover — that is bread-and-butter work for a local IT firm like HashWhales, priced as a small project, not a retainer.