Business Continuity Plan

My business partners and i have been working with consultants for the past few months to help us assess or corporate infrastructure and it has been a valuable process.  We have been extremely blessed as a company, and as a result we felt that it was important to have some “outside eyes” come in and take a look at our infrastructure and give us their opinion as to some things we could improve upon. In addition to consulting us on things like Life Insurance Investments, Performance Bonding, and Operating Agreements, they have also prompted us to look at our Business Continuity Plan.

This is something that I honestly hadn’t given a lot of thought until we started discussing yesterday afternoon what would happen if one of us crashed a plane or choked on a lobster tail.  Granted it would be a very tragic occurrence but it’s something that we need to definitely keep in mind for the welfare of our company.  Since I have two partners we each more or less take care of managing our own ends of the business, and from day one we have always worked very well together and served the needs of our clients extremely well, but without one of us there, how would the other two pick up the slack and keep things running smoothly?  This is where a Business Continuity Plan comes into play…

I sat down this morning and mapped out my home network which consists of 2 development machines and a test server.  I outlined all of the critical processes that I have running from my office location and how to operate those processes.  I also outlined where all of my client project data is stored from the past 11 years and sent copies of all of this to my partners, they have done the same thing on their end.

In addition, I sent a copy of my instructions to my survivors including my wife, parents, and in-laws, stating that in the event that I should become incapacitated or dead that it would be imperative that these systems and files be immediately turned over to my partners not only for the well-being of our company but also for our clients that have entrusted us with their business over the years.

The entire document only took a few minutes to put together, but it’s very detailed as to what all critical data I have at my office and it will save anyone who has to come behind me to retrieve any of this data.  Maybe we were behind the curve a little bit by not already having a plan like this in place, I personally had never seen a plan like this before in the 10 years or so I have been involved with this industry, it definitely makes a lot of sense to me though and I thought that it was something that might be worthy of considering if you haven’t already got one.  Another way of looking at this whole thing, if not just to give your business partners and employees the peace of mind knowing that if you should die that they would not be in a bad position moving forward, would be to think about the peace of mind you could provide your clients moving forward as well…

Just random thoughts…