If you’re a first-time founder, it’s easy to think emergencies won’t happen to you. Why write a contingency plan when everything’s running fine? Ask anyone a decade ahead of you. They’ll tell you it was all going great, until it wasn’t and it can all be avoided with just a touch of forward thinking and a business continuity plan.
Think of a business continuity plan as your break-glass-in-case-of-emergency manual. It spells out how to keep operating, or recover fast, when something breaks. A supplier vanishes. Your site goes down. Your co-founder gets hit by a bus. You won’t be thinking straight in that moment, so this one-pager does the thinking for you.
What a business continuity plan actually is
A business continuity plan (BCP) is your documented backup plan for staying open when normal operations get disrupted. That’s it. It’s the “what do we do if” instructions before the “if” happens.
The idea comes straight from the Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders, written by our founder, Peter Deans. The book is blunt about it. For every disruption you can reasonably see coming, you should have a documented contingency plan that lives on paper, not swirling in your head.
“It will be important to have documented backup, or contingency, plans for continued operations if something does go wrong.” Peter Deans, author of Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders
Sticking to one page is important
Founders skip continuity planning because it sounds like a corporate 80-page binder nobody reads. But think about the last crisis you lived through. Were you thinking clearly? You were running on adrenaline and emotion, and a novel-length document is no help when the building’s on fire.
A plan you’ll actually use is short, plain, and findable in ten seconds. Keep it to a page and somewhere the whole team can reach. Anything you have to slog through is worse than useless, because you’ll never open it in the moment you need it most.
The 4 disruptions worth planning for
Our Startup Toolkit ties a continuity plan to four operational risks. These are the ones most likely to knock a startup off its feet, and the ones the plan exists to catch.
1. Operations and process breaks down
Aka you can’t run the business as normally planned. Could be technical, could be a management issue, could be short, medium or long-term. It often comes from outside your four walls. A supplier changes their terms overnight. A courier stops delivering to your area. The place you rent goes offline.
Plan for: the workaround, who to call – have suppliers on standby.
2. An outsourced partner drops the ball
This is outsource risk. A key third party you rely on fails to deliver on what they promised. If your fulfilment, your dev work, your bookkeeping or your customer support sits with someone else, their downfalls become yours.
Plan for: a backup provider, or a manual stopgap for anything you’ve handed off. If one supplier failing can stop your whole business, you’re at the mercy of a single point of failure.
3. Your tech falls over
This is an IT risk. One or more parts of your systems, tools or infrastructure fail, and you can’t operate. It often shows up when you’re mid-way through building or upgrading something.
Your website, your payment system, your database, your booking tool. Any of them going dark can stop your revenue cold.
Plan for: backups, a status page, a comms rollout and a “here’s how we take orders manually” fallback while it’s down.
4. You get hit by a cyber attack
This is cyber security risk, and the book calls it a major risk for every business regardless of size. Theft of money or data, ransomware, files deleted, your site shut down, your customer comms cut off.
Startups get targeted precisely because attackers assume you haven’t locked the doors.
Plan for: who responds, how you tell customers, and how you restore from backup. We’ve covered the prevention side in the startup security checklist. The continuity plan is what you do after prevention fails.
Disruption | The trigger | What your plan needs |
|---|---|---|
Operations & process | Can’t run the business as planned | Workaround, who to call, how long you last |
Outsource | A key supplier fails to deliver | Backup provider or manual stopgap |
IT | Systems, tools or infrastructure fail | Backups, status page, manual fallback |
Cyber security | Hack, ransomware, data or money stolen | Response owner, customer comms, restore plan |
How to write your plan in an afternoon
Step 1: Brainstorm “what can go wrong”
Sit down with your team or business partners and run a “what can go wrong” session across your operations and technology. Map it to the customer journey you already know. Every step where you collect info, take payment, or deliver the product is a step that can break.
Step 2: Write down the ones that would actually hurt
You can’t plan for everything. Don’t try. List only the disruptions that are both plausible and material. The ones that would stop revenue, lose customers, or land you in legal trouble.
Step 3: For each one, write three things
Keep every entry to three lines:
- What breaks.
- What we do immediately (the workaround).
- Who owns getting it fixed.
Step 4: Name a person, not a team
“The team will handle it” means nobody handles it.
Every disruption needs one name next to it. That person owns the response. If it’s just you right now, it’s your name four times, and that’s fine. It’ll change as you hire.
Test it before you need it
Before you launch, run a soft launch and get friends or family to buy the product, so you can test your tech and your end-to-end process while the stakes are low.
Do the same with your continuity plan. Pull the plug on purpose. Pretend your main supplier just quit and walk through your own steps. You’ll find the gaps much easier in a calm afternoon instead of a live crisis.
Most startups don’t fail because of one dramatic disaster. They fail because a normal, survivable disruption caught them with no plan. Take an afternoon to future-proof yourself. It could be the difference between a small hiccup and a sinking ship.
Want the full picture? Business continuity and operational risk sit in the Risk Management chapter of the Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders, built on the 52 Risks® framework Peter developed over decades as a financier. Or grab the Startup Bundle and get the book plus the templates that keep the rest of your business on the rails.
