I want to ask you something that might be a little uncomfortable.
If an unexpected disruption hit your business tomorrow — not someday, not theoretically, but tomorrow — would your leadership team know exactly what to do?
Most business owners answer yes. And most of them are operating on an assumption they’ve never actually tested.
September is National Preparedness Month, which makes it the perfect time to find out. And here’s the good news: you don’t need a full-day offsite, a complicated planning process, or a 40-page document.
You need 15 minutes, the right people in the room, and five honest questions. That’s it. Let me walk you through them. 😊
Question 1: If our business stopped operating tomorrow, what would need to come back first?
You probably already know which tools your team depends on every day. But recovery planning requires a more specific answer than “everything.”
If operations stopped tomorrow, your team would need to act on priorities — not restore the whole world at once. So which functions actually can’t sit idle?
Maybe it’s customer support. Maybe it’s payment processing, scheduling, order fulfillment, or access to the files your team needs to keep work moving. The answer will be different for every business — but the exercise is the same.
When you define those priorities before something happens, your team can focus on what matters most instead of scrambling to figure it out under pressure.
This question alone is worth the 15 minutes.
Question 2: Who is actually responsible for making decisions during a disruption?
Pressure has a way of exposing unclear ownership really fast.
When nobody knows who can make the call, people wait for approval. Work gets duplicated. Leaders get pulled into three separate conversations that all cover the same ground. The response slows down at exactly the moment when speed matters most.
Your team needs to know:
- Who starts the response?
- Who updates employees?
- Who communicates with customers?
- Who coordinates with vendors, service providers, or your IT partner?
These roles don’t need to create a complicated chain of command. They need to remove confusion when timing matters. Because clarity is what lets people act with confidence when their normal routine suddenly breaks down.
Question 3: How would we communicate if our normal tools weren’t available?
Email, phones, and collaboration platforms feel completely reliable — until the moment they stop working. Then even simple communication can become harder than it should be.
If employees couldn’t access their email, would they know where to look for instructions? If your phone system failed, how would customers reach your team? If Slack or Teams went down, where would leadership share updates?
Your backup communication plan doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to give your employees and customers a dependable place to turn when the usual channels aren’t available.
And when people are confused and stressed, dependable is everything. </soapbox>
Question 4: What’s our single biggest operational dependency?
This one is worth slowing down on, because the answer sometimes surprises people.
Some risks hide in plain sight — precisely because they support the business every single day without drawing attention.
It might be one software platform your entire operation runs through. An internet connection that everything depends on. A third-party provider whose uptime you’ve never really thought about. Or — and this one comes up more than you’d think — a single employee who knows a critical process that nobody else fully understands.
During normal operations? None of those seem risky. But a single failure in any of them can affect multiple parts of your business simultaneously. Understanding that dependency helps you decide where to focus: documentation, testing, backup options, or outside support that could reduce unnecessary risk.
Question 5: If a disruption hit tomorrow, what would we *wish* we’d prepared today?
This is my favorite question. Because it’s the one that actually cuts through the noise. It puts your leaders inside the moment they’re trying to avoid — and asks them to look back from there.
Your team might wish they’d documented a process. Tested the backups. Updated the contact list. Defined who owns what. Agreed on which systems come back online in what order.
None of those things sound dramatic on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. Which is exactly why they keep getting pushed aside.
Preparation gives you room to respond instead of react. The best recovery plans answer questions before anyone has to ask them. 💪
What Happens After You Ask the Five Questions
After working through these, you’ll know something important: which answers feel solid and which ones are actually just assumptions. That’s the value of the exercise. Not creating a perfect plan in 15 minutes — but surfacing the gaps before something forces you to deal with them.
That’s also where a good IT partner adds real value. Not just fixing things when they break, but helping you identify operational risks, test recovery processes, verify that backups actually work, document key systems, and connect your technology decisions to your actual business goals.
Preparedness doesn’t need to feel technical or overwhelming. It just needs to happen before it’s urgent.
Put this 15-minute meeting on your calendar this week. If your leadership team can answer all five questions clearly, you’re in great shape. If some answers feel uncertain — that’s not a failure. It’s information. And information is always better than a surprise. 🎯