What is a business continuity plan and why is it important?

In order to create a business continuity plan, organisations need to analyse their current working patterns and identify any weaknesses or areas of risk, as well as gather all the key information underlying their day-to-day operations. 

Doing so in service of creating a clear, centralised document therefore allows you to double-down on processes, refresh employee understandings of procedures, and come out more resilient than before. 

Downtime is a common consequence of disruptions to your operations. Should it happen, you’ll soon find that downtime quickly results in the loss of sales, security risks, unhappy customers, and more – read our guide for more information on why uptime is so important. 

But, with a strong business continuity plan in place, you’ll be able to reduce the disruption – and ideally keep running at least a minimal level of service throughout, which means saved money, and saved catch-up time when you’re ready to get back to business as usual. 

If something does go wrong, the way your agency responds will have a huge effect on your reputation. If you’re able to mitigate the effects, protect your clients as much as possible, and keep your basic functions running – you’ll have proven yourself to be a trustworthy partner. 

Your clients will get peace of mind that you have everything under control, and you won’t have to deal with complaints in addition to your more practical crisis management tasks, either. 

The planning process – which involves searching for weaknesses and security challenges within your agency – can highlight inefficiencies in your overall structure which can then be addressed. 

Meaning that creating the continuity plan can improve your business’ framework – and give you improved performance – even outside of disaster scenarios.

Protecting your business begins with understanding your risks and their potential impacts. For example, a cyber attack might bring down your IT systems, but not harm your hardware. Whereas a pandemic might put your people out of action, but leave your studio untouched.

Where to start: Make a list of potential risks, then prioritise them. Begin with the ones most likely to happen, or most harmful for your business. We’ve put together a risk assessment template you can use to get the ball rolling.

Threats to your business won’t always be malicious or dramatic – they could be as simple as a key team member moving on or falling unwell for an extended period of time. For that reason, it’s important not to put too much knowledge or control in just one person’s hands. Instead, make sure your whole team has a good understanding of essential processes, creative work and client contacts.

Where to start: Document your processes in detail, as clearly as possible, and save them centrally so you can access them anytime. Encourage your team to be open about their work, sharing knowledge across teams so anyone can pick up a project without confusion or delay. 

A lot of functions and processes go into making an agency tick; from revenue-generators like designing websites, to support services like billing and payroll. Some will be manually carried-out by your team, while others will be automated by the systems you’ve put in place. But what would happen if one, some, or all of them failed?

Where to start: List all the functions that go into running your agency, then work out the knock-on effect of each one being disrupted. Thinking about the impact each element has on the rest of your business will help you to prioritise the protection of the ones you rely on most heavily.