If your business couldn't operate normally tomorrow, would your team know exactly what to do?
For business owners in Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, that's not a hypothetical question.
We've seen hurricanes, extended power outages, internet outages and other disruptions make offices inaccessible and knock critical systems offline. And sometimes the disruption is much less dramatic—a failed internet connection, a critical software problem or the one employee who knows how something works suddenly being unavailable.
The problem is that many growing businesses don't discover the holes in their plan until they're already in the middle of the problem.
September is National Preparedness Month, which makes this a good time to find those gaps before you need the answers.
And you don't need an all-day planning session to get started.
Get your leadership team together for 15 minutes and ask these five questions.
1. If we couldn't operate normally tomorrow, what would we need back FIRST?
Imagine it's tomorrow morning.
Your office doesn't have power.
Your internet connection is down.
Your building isn't accessible.
Or a critical system your employees use every day simply isn't working.
What absolutely has to work for your business to keep operating?
For one company, that might be QuickBooks or access to shared files.
For another, it could be the phones, email, scheduling system, line-of-business software, payment processing or the ability for employees to work from another location.
Don't just make a list of everything you use.
Ask:
“What can we absolutely NOT afford to be without for a day?”
Then put those systems in order.
Because when something goes wrong, you don't want your team trying to restore everything at once.
You want everyone to already know what gets attention first.
2. Who owns the problem when something goes wrong?
This is where a lot of small businesses get into trouble.
Something stops working and suddenly you have:
The owner calling the office manager.
The office manager calling the IT person.
The IT person calling the internet company.
The internet company saying it's not their problem.
The software vendor saying it's an IT problem.
And meanwhile, employees are asking:
“Are we back up yet?”
That's not a technology problem anymore.
That's an ownership problem.
Your team should already know who makes decisions, who communicates with employees, who updates customers if necessary, and—most importantly—who is responsible for getting the technology problem resolved.
Because when your business is down, you don't need three vendors pointing fingers at each other.
You need somebody who will say:
“We've got it. We'll get the right people involved and get this handled.”
3. How would we communicate if our normal tools weren't available?
Most days, email, phones, Microsoft 365 and other communication tools are simply there.
Until they aren't.
So imagine your employees can't access email tomorrow morning.
How do you reach everybody?
If your phone system isn't working, how do customers reach you?
If the office is inaccessible after a storm, how will employees know whether they're expected to work remotely, report somewhere else or wait for instructions?
And does everyone already know the answer—or does one person have a spreadsheet somewhere with everybody's cell phone numbers?
Your backup communication plan doesn't need to be complicated.
But it needs to exist before you need it.
4. What is the ONE thing our business depends on more than we realize?
Every business has dependencies that become almost invisible because they're always there.
Until suddenly they're not.
Maybe it's your internet connection.
Maybe it's QuickBooks.
Maybe it's your server.
Maybe it's a cloud application.
Maybe it's a third-party vendor.
And sometimes it isn't technology at all.
Sometimes it's Susan.
Susan knows the passwords.
Susan knows how the software works.
Susan knows which vendor to call.
Susan knows where that file is.
Susan knows how everything is connected.
That's fine...
until Susan isn't available.
Ask your leadership team:
“If this system, vendor or person suddenly wasn't available tomorrow, what would stop working?”
If the answer is “a lot,” you've identified something that needs documentation, a backup plan or additional support.
5. If a hurricane, outage or major technology problem happened tomorrow, what would we wish we'd done TODAY?
This may be the most important question of the five.
Put yourself in that situation.
It's tomorrow morning and something has happened.
Your employees are waiting.
Customers are calling.
Something important isn't working.
What would you wish you had taken care of yesterday?
Maybe:
“We should have tested our backups.”
“We should have had everyone's contact information somewhere besides the system that's down.”
“We should have documented those passwords.”
“We should have known which computers employees could take home.”
“We should have figured out whether our phone system could work somewhere else.”
“We should have known who to call.”
“We should have replaced that old piece of equipment when we had the chance.”
None of those things feels urgent on a normal Tuesday afternoon.
That's exactly why they get pushed aside.
The purpose of preparation isn't to predict every possible problem.
It's to make sure that when something happens, you're executing a plan instead of inventing one.
Here's the bigger question for the owner
After your 15-minute meeting, pay attention to something.
How many of your answers are you actually confident about?
There's a big difference between:
“I think our backups are working.”
and
“Yes, they're working and they're being tested.”
There's a difference between:
“I'm pretty sure everyone could work from somewhere else.”
and
“Yes. We've planned for that.”
And there's a big difference between:
“We have an IT guy we can call.”
and
“We have an IT team responsible for making sure this gets handled.”
As businesses grow, their technology usually becomes more complicated long before they're big enough to hire their own IT department.
That's where the right IT partner comes in.
A good IT partner doesn't just show up when something breaks.
They help you understand what your business depends on, document your systems, verify your backups, plan for equipment replacement, coordinate with other technology vendors and prepare for the problems you hope never happen.
Because you shouldn't be trying to figure all of this out while your employees are waiting for you to tell them what to do.
Put This 15-Minute Meeting On Your Calendar
If you own or lead a growing business in Southwest Louisiana or Southeast Texas, put this meeting on your calendar.
Ask the five questions.
If your team has confident answers to all five, that's a great sign.
But if you hear...
“I think so.”
“I'm not sure.”
“Our IT guy probably knows.”
or...
“We've never really talked about that.”
...you've just identified something worth addressing.
And if your business has reached the point where technology is too important to keep winging it—but you're not big enough to hire an IT department of your own—we should talk.
Schedule a quick discovery call with National Networks.
We'll learn how you're handling IT today, where you may be relying on assumptions and whether there are gaps worth addressing before they become your problem.
You run your business. Let us help take responsibility for the IT.
Call us at 888-219-4266 .
