Unexpected work delays can bankrupt a company, costing millions in lost revenue and expenses. All scouts know the famous scouting motto, “Always be prepared,” but ask yourself: when was the last time you applied it to your business functions?

The primary goal of business continuity planning for your company or organization is quite elementary — have a clear, actionable, and proactive plan in place for whatever unforeseen situation might come your way. This includes natural disasters, outages, cybersecurity attacks, pandemics, and more. We’ll walk you through some of the crucial pain points you need to address before you can declare your business continuity plan (BCP) 

What does business continuity mean?

Business continuity is the concept of organizations operating and concentrating on crucial business processes during alarming situations through advanced planning and preparation. These worrying circumstances include pandemics, economic crises, violent incidents, and other calamities that interfere with business operations. 

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) outlines how a company will function throughout and following a crisis event. To ensure consistency, the BCP provides details on policies, procedures, and work instructions.

What is the primary goal of business continuity planning?

The main goal of business continuity planning is to support crucial business operations during a crisis. Planning ensures a company's ability to operate with limited resources or access to buildings. Planning for continuity also aims to minimize reputational or financial losses.   

A business continuity plan should detail several important steps that an organization must take to get ready for potential activity disruptions, including the following:

• Identify potential dangers for a company.
• Evaluate any potential effects on daily operations at the company.
• Establish a structure that enables crucial business operations to continue both during and after the event, and offer a way to reduce these potential problems.
• Decide which resources, such as personnel, tools, and backup locations, the organization needs to keep running.

What are the goals of business continuity planning?

Now that we know what the main goal of business continuity planning is, let's look at some of the objectives that companies can accomplish through it:

• Operations continuity assurance in the face of disruption entails ensuring that your company has the capacity, protocols, systems, and practices in place to minimize the most likely types of disruption.
• Increased risk mitigation as businesses can increase risk mitigation by establishing a risk management strategy and conducting regular appraisals and assessments of both old and new risks.
• Making sure your organization has the platforms (infrastructure, resources, technology, and capacity) it needs to continue operating in the event of a major disruption is known as having robust platforms.
• Better commercial health and competitiveness by building the organization's capacity to ensure that it can function more effectively and provide for its customers' needs than its rivals in the event of a major catastrophe.
• Reducing the likelihood of financial loss by increasing financial stability by making sure the company can efficiently recover from any catastrophic event
• Gained greater customer trust and dependability by ensuring the continuous availability of all essential services and goods in the event of a catastrophic incident.
• Securing your contribution to the national economy is important as businesses can support local employment and industry by continuing to make a contribution to the local, regional, and national economies.
• Boost your ability to handle disruptions that have an adverse effect on your business.
• Increased resistance to disruption, protection of sales, production, staff, and customers

How can you write a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan is basically a list of actions that a company must take in unusual circumstances. After gathering data on the processes, tools, and important stakeholders, the plan must be written. Once this data has been gathered, you must write the plan using the available resources. However, the following are the general procedures for drafting a business continuity plan:

• Mission statement: The goals of the business, plans, grants, and budget for recovery and disaster preparation all need to be in writing.
• Setting up the governance: You must list the team members' roles, positions held, and contact information. A suggested addition is an organizational chart.
• Writing the plan's appendices and procedures: You must create the procedures, agreements, and tools.
• Training program: Both the training curriculum and the schedule need to be developed. You must configure the training data for both new training and refresher training.

Conclusion

Business continuity is an essential component of every company because it allows for uninterrupted operations. There will never be a good time to scale back or stop running your business. It has been estimated that large businesses lose $400,000 on average for each hour of downtime, making even brief outages costly. Establishing your own business continuity plan's objectives can make the difference between running a successful company for a long time and having to shut down.