Business Continuity for SMEs: Founder-to-Founder

Most SMEs don’t ignore business continuity because they don’t care. They ignore it because it sounds like paperwork. A binder. A policy someone wrote for a regulator, not for real life. But here’s the truth: if your business runs on IT, you already have a continuity plan. It’s just living in people’s heads. And when something breaks, that “plan” usually looks like panic, a flurry of messages, someone trying passwords they vaguely remember, and a supplier support queue. Then you lose a day. Sometimes a week. I’m writing this founder-to-founder because I’ve seen the pattern too many times: good businesses getting knocked sideways by something that wasn’t dramatic, just inconvenient at the wrong moment.

Continuity isn’t about disasters. It’s about normal bad days.

When people hear “business continuity”, they picture floods, fires, and headline-making cyber-attacks. In reality, continuity is about the boring stuff. The internet line dies on the day you need to send a proposal. A key staff member is off sick and they’re the only one who knows how the system works. Microsoft 365 locks an account because it spotted a risky login. A laptop gets stolen and suddenly you’re asking, “What was on that?” A supplier outage stops you taking payments.
None of that makes the news. But it can absolutely wreck a week. The goal isn’tto prevent every problem. The goal is to stay calm, stay operational, andrecover fast.

The biggest continuity risk in SMEs: hidden single points of failure.

Most continuity issues in small businesses come down to dependency. One person holds the knowledge (or the logins). One device holds the data. One system is doing too much heavy lifting. One supplier mission-critical with no fallback.

Because things usually work, it’s easy to assume they’ll keep working. Until they don’t. This is why continuity isn’t a document. It’s a decision: are we willing to be dependent on one thing we can’t quickly replace?

A continuity plan that fits an SME.

Here’s the version that works in the real world. First, decide what “still trading” means for you. Not “everything must work.” Just what must keep moving for the business to function for the next 24–72 hours. For most SMEs, it’s some combination of being reachable(phone/email), accessing customer information, delivering the core service, and taking payments or invoicing. If you can keep those moving, you can survive a surprising amount.

Next, make peace with “temporary but workable”. This is where SMEs get stuck. They think continuity means building a perfect duplicate of everything. It doesn’t. It means having a good-enough fallback that keeps the wheels turning. If email is down, you can still communicate via a temporary mailbox and a simple customer update. If the office internet is down, you can still work using a 4G/5G backup for essential staff. If a laptop disappears, you can still operate if your data and access are cloud-based and protected with MFA.

The point isn’t elegance. The point is speed. Then treat access like oxygen. In continuity situations, the thing that slows everything down is rarely the technology. It’s access. Who has admin rights? Where are the passwords? Who can approve changes? What happens if the person who knows is unavailable? If you fix one area this quarter, fix this. A password manager, separate admin accounts, and a simple “who owns what” note removes a huge amount of fragility.

And a quick word on backups: backups aren’t a continuity plan unless you’ve restored. A backup you’ve never tested is a hope, not a plan. Confidence comes from doing a restore test and knowing what you can recover, how long it takes, and what breaks during the process. Even one test a quarter is enough to stop backups becoming a false sense of security.

Finally, write the “when it happens” page. This is the only document most SMEs need. Not a policy. Not a framework. A single page that answers what’s broken, what the workaround is, who is leading it, who needs to be told, and when the next update will be. Because in the moment, you don’t want to invent a process. You want to follow one.

Continuity is a competitive advantage.

Here’s the part people miss continuity isn’t just defensive. It’s a growth enabler. When your business is resilient, you take on bigger clients with more confidence. You handle supplier issues without drama. You recover from incidents without losing trust. You stop relying on heroics (yours or your team’s). And if you’re a founder, it buys you something priceless: headspace. You’re not constantly waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

If you only do one thing this month.

If you want a simple starting point without turning it into a project, pick three “can’t stop” processes, identify the single point of failure for each, and put one fallback in place. That might be backup internet. It might be a spare device. It might be getting passwords out of someone’s head and into a proper vault. Not perfect. But practical.

And practical is what keeps SMEs trading.

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