Some of the worst days in a small business are not caused by the problem itself. They are caused by the first twenty minutes of confusion. The phones are down and three people are calling three different vendors. A laptop is stolen and nobody is sure which accounts were on it. Someone clicks something suspicious and spends an hour deciding whether to mention it.
The fix is not complicated. It is one page, written on a calm day, that says who does what when something goes wrong. I call it an incident plan, but the name does not matter. What matters is that it exists and people know where it is.
Why one page
I have read long continuity plans. They are thorough, but few people read them under stress. A single page gets used. It sits on the wall, in a shared folder and in the owner’s phone, and a new employee can understand it in five minutes. If you want more detail later, you can add it behind the first page.
It also fits how I think about written processes in general. If the answer lives only in one person’s head, it is a risk. Writing it down turns that knowledge into something the whole team can use, including on a day the one person who knows is out sick.
What goes on the page
Here is the outline I use with business owners. Adjust it for your own setup.
Part one: Who to tell first
Name one person who is the point of contact for any technology problem, and a backup for when that person is unavailable. Staff should not have to guess. Include cell phone numbers, since the office line may be the thing that is broken.
Part two: Who to call for what
List each vendor with the phone number, your account number and what they handle: your internet provider, your phone provider, your IT support, your website host, your bank or payment processor and your insurance agent. Account numbers are the detail people always lack in the moment. Put them on the page.
Part three: What to do for the most likely problems
Think of the four or five things most likely to happen and write two or three lines for each:
- The internet is down. Check the equipment lights, restart in the order your provider recommends, then call them. Say whether you have a backup connection and how staff switch to it.
- The phones are not working. Call your phone provider and ask them to forward your main number to a cell phone. Many providers can do this quickly if you have your account details ready. I wrote about why this matters in A Dropped Call Is a Missed Job.
- A device is lost or stolen. Report it to the point of contact right away, change passwords for the accounts used on it and ask your IT provider about locking or wiping it.
- Someone clicked something suspicious. Disconnect the computer from the network, do not keep working, and tell the point of contact immediately. Make it clear in writing that reporting quickly is never punished.
- Files are missing or unreadable. Stop saving new files to the affected location and contact your IT provider. See the backup section of the plan.
Part four: Where your backups are
State what is backed up, where the copies live, who can restore them and the last time a restore was tested. If you cannot fill in those lines, that is useful to learn now. My article on the four backup questions every owner should answer covers how to get there.
Part five: How to reach customers
If you are going to be slow or unavailable, who tells customers, and how? Maybe it is a note on your Google listing, a message on your website or a text to scheduled appointments. Decide in advance who has the authority to say it, so nobody has to ask permission in a crisis.
Part six: Where the logins are
Say where the important credentials are kept, such as your password manager, and who has emergency access. Do not write passwords on the page itself. Just record where to find them and who can open the vault.
Keep it alive
A plan is only as good as its last update. Put a reminder on the calendar to review it twice a year, and any time you change a vendor, hire for a key role or move offices. Check every phone number while you are at it. Nothing is more frustrating than discovering during an emergency that the number on the page belongs to someone who left.
It also helps to practice once. Spend fifteen minutes with your team walking through one scenario out loud. Where would you look? Who would you call? You will find a gap every time, and finding it in a meeting costs far less than finding it in the middle of a bad Tuesday.
Start small
If you do nothing else this week, write the vendor list with account numbers and the name of your point of contact. That alone removes much of the delay I see when things break. You can build the rest over a few weeks.
My book, The Small Business Technology Guide, covers more of these basics. And if you would like help turning your own setup into a clear one-page plan, the team at DirecTech Connect is glad to sit down with you and do it.
Danielle Lemons is Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, a Nashville provider of business phone systems, managed IT services, websites and digital marketing. More about Danielle.
Read more of Danielle’s writing, or see her profile at DirecTech Connect.
