"Your Plan" Business Recovery Guide

Businesses play an important role in the ability of a community to recover quickly after a disaster.  Your Plan (pdf) is a tool to assist a business in creating your own Business Recovery Plan.  Print it out and fill out the blanks and modify it to fit your business' needs. 

YOUR BUSINESS RECOVERY PLAN: A BUSINESS CONTINUITY/CONTINGENCY/RECOVERY PLANNING TOOL

The following planning tool is design to allow any size of business to determine whether they need to develop a plan and, if needed, how to proceed. This process will educate everyone, first in the language and significant to this planning process. It is designed to do as much or as little as a business feels they need or can afford to do in the planning development. This tool and the development process is handled by seven chapters that are designed to be easy to follow and change to fit everyone's needs. A roadmap will get you from start to finish but allows you to go in other directions, if you feel a different path would work better. The chapters are:

GLOSSARY - This will bring the planning language into focus and can to added or changed to fit your needs.

FACILITATOR'S GUIDE - This allows for you to create the plan by yourself or to have a facilitator come in and assist the planning process.

BUSINESS PROCESS DESCRIPTION - A very high level look at your business, its process (core functions/activities), and the start of the planning process. Some of the information collected here will pass along to the next chapters.

BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS - Here is where you can use the developed formulas to determine whether a plan is needed. This chapters takes you through the maximum time your business can survive without operating and what are the minimum levels of service you need to provide to keep the business running without losing your customer base.

RECOVERY PLANS - This is where you will develop your plan by understanding what would happen to your business through five scenarios. This will help identify each step, its time frame, resources needed and who is responsible to complete each recovery step.

PLAN IMPLEMENTATION & MANAGEMENT - Once the plan is completed, this chapter covers what is needed to install, train and validate your plan.

APPENDIX - Here is where you can collect call lists for employees and vendors, critical files and forms, and equipment needed for the continuity and recovery of your business.

We also have a flowchart detailing the step-by-step process to create a Business Continuity Plan.  

Again this planning process has been designed to help you through creating your plan and brings up the questions that need to be answered. It can be modified where and when you feel different steps are needed. The time needed to go through the tool can be as little as a few hours or a few days.  Spending the time now can save you significant financial losses in the future, because when a disaster strikes you have already taken the steps to keep your business open.