Failing to plan is planning to fail When I ask small business owners about their position on business continuity planning, they often say that is that it’s not something they are focused on, or that it is something they have thought about but not implemented. If you are the owner of a small business, then…
Survey shows that small businesses need to take Business Continuity more seriously than they currently do The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) recently published its annual survey of disaster preparedness in the UK, and it doesn’t make good reading if you are a small business. Produced in association with AON, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), The…
Having a business continuity plan will help you when you sell your business. So, you want to sell your business. Great, I hope you get a lot of money for it. But, have you considered the impact you leaving will have on the company? You can bet that any potential buyer will; unless of course…
Why is Business Continuity such a low priority in Small Businesses? Getting micro (< 10 employees) and small (between 10 and 100 employees) businesses to take a serious interest in Business Continuity is hard work. The stock response to the question: “What are your business continuity plans?” is often of the form “Business Continuity? Isn’t…
This is the title of an interesting perspective on business continuity planning over on Barrie Conrad’s Insurance Investments Blog. I don’t necessarily agree that preparing a good business continuity plan has to be time consuming and expensive: at least not if you are a small business. However, you do need to approach the task seriously:…
It’s all very well planning on how your business is going to survive a major incident or disaster, but don’t forget to plan how you and your family would survive a similar incident. Houses burn down as well as factories People lose power at home as well as at work: probably more so in fact…
I was at a Business Link focus group yesterday and got chatting with the owner of a small software company. She was talking about the trouble she had experienced recruiting her development team and how it had taken her a year to recruit one key resource. When I asked her what would be the impact…
Last Friday I delivered a presentation on how to improve the reslience of a business by implementing a business continuity plan. For this I used Prezi rather than using Powerpoint. The example strategy is appropriate for audience of micro business owners, but the principles are universal. Accepting that you won’t hear my dulcet tones as…
Last December, the British Insurance Brokers Association [BIBA] called on the government to do more to ensure that small businesses survive major incidents such as floods, fires, pandemics or terrorism. Whether or not this is a responsibility of government, it is clearly good governance to assure the continuity of your business. In an article on…
According to Stuart Sterling, assistant director of the SME corporate resilience task force at the Cabinet Office, Small Medium Enterprises (SME – those employing less than 250 employees) are “the soft underbellies of UK plc”. (quoted from Business resilience in the supply chain) Sterling was speaking at the recent BRiSC2010 (Business Resilience in the Supply…
