In today’s fast-paced environment, disruptions can arrive without warning — from power or telecoms outages to cyber-attacks or the sudden unavailability of key people. Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a practical, proactive approach that helps you keep your most important operations running and recover quickly with minimal impact.
Wellis Technology specialises in helping small businesses (1–50 employees, under £500k turnover) create right-sized continuity plans that are easy to maintain and simple to use under pressure.
What is Business Continuity Planning?
BCP means preparing a set of prevention and recovery procedures to deal with events that could disrupt your business. The goal is to protect your people and assets and to resume critical work quickly, reducing downtime, cost, and reputational damage. We use UK guidance and can map to recognised standards (e.g., ISO 22301, ISO 31000) without adding heavy bureaucracy.
Key components of your plan
Risk Assessment
- Identify threats and vulnerabilities that could disrupt operations.
- Consider likelihood and impact across people, premises, suppliers, IT and data.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
- Pinpoint critical functions and dependencies.
- Understand consequences if these functions are unavailable.
Strategy Development
- Mitigation and fallback options (temporary workarounds, alternative sites/suppliers).
- Recovery strategies that are realistic for small teams.
Plan Development
- Write concise procedures: emergency response, crisis comms, stakeholder updates.
- Include contacts, supplier details, roles and responsibilities.
Testing & Maintenance
- Run short tabletop exercises and adjust the plan after each test.
- Keep the plan current as systems, people and suppliers change.
Benefits of a continuity plan
- Minimises downtime — keep essential functions running or restore them quickly.
- Protects reputation — demonstrate control and reliability during disruption.
- Meets expectations — many customers and regulators expect continuity capability.
Real-life scenarios we’ve handled
- Chief Executive seriously ill and out of action for almost a year.
- Senior personnel became ill and never returned.
- Telecoms cables cut by a contractor — a week without office internet.
- Total power failure — all computers down, work halted.
- IT equipment failure — one case with no backups; another with unknown backups; a third with off-site backups but snow blocked access.
- Spam/phishing attack — bank accounts compromised and devices locked out.
A simple example: small scaffolding firm
The owner manages bookings, scheduling, deposits and key information. If they’re suddenly unavailable, who knows where the job book is, the safe key, bank access, website/social logins and supplier contacts? A short, shared plan prevents chaos and keeps work moving.
How we build your plan (for small teams)
- Week 1: quick risks & dependency check; gather contacts and suppliers.
- Weeks 2–3: write the plan; verify backups with a test restore; run a 60-minute tabletop exercise.
- Week 4: finalise the plan; brief the team; schedule the next review.
Useful UK guidance
- NCSC: Small Business Response & Recovery
- NCSC: Exercise in a Box (free incident exercising)
- ISO 22301 overview (Business Continuity principles)
- ISO 31000 overview (Risk Management principles)
We keep the process calm and practical — avoiding scare tactics — and size everything for smaller organisations.