What is business continuity?

Disaster recovery restores technology. Continuity keeps the business trading while that is happening, which is a broader and more human problem.

Small businesses have the advantage of simplicity here. A plan that fits on one page and is actually known beats a folder nobody has opened.

Phones come first on that page more often than people expect. A customer who cannot reach you assumes you are shut.

Most real disruptions are unglamorous. A burst pipe, a power cut, a key person off sick during your busiest week.

Say you run a four-chair salon, and at 7:40 one Tuesday the ceiling comes down over chairs three and four. Nobody's hurt. You have 22 appointments today. A page pinned up in the back room says what to do, in order.

Calls come first. Your main number already reaches a person or an assistant, so you leave it alone and change the greeting to mention the closure. Today's clients are next. The page names who texts them (Dana) and where the list lives (the booking app on her phone). By 8:15 all 22 have a message offering a new day, or a chair at the salon two streets away, whose owner agreed to the swap last year. Third on the page is the insurer's claim line and your policy number. Two stylists go to the partner salon and two go home paid. By 9:00 you've lost a day's revenue and none of your customers.

Testing a continuity plan doesn't need alarms. Sit down with your team for 30 minutes and read out a scenario. Maybe the internet is down all day, or your manager is in the hospital for two weeks. Perhaps the card reader company has an outage on your busiest Saturday. For each one, ask who does what in the first hour, and listen for somebody saying "I thought you had that". Every time you hear it you've found a gap, and gaps are cheap to fix at a table.

Check for single points of knowledge while you're at it. Who besides you can sign in to the bank, the carrier portal and the booking system? If the answer is nobody, a bad flu becomes a business outage. A password manager with emergency access fixes that in an afternoon.

Plans matter least for losses that insurance covers and time heals. They matter most where customers quietly go elsewhere, which means unanswered phones and unkept appointments.

An assistant answering your line is one continuity measure among several, and it covers the case where nobody in the building can pick up.

GreetKeeper offers no service level agreement and publishes no uptime figure, so treat it as one layer rather than as the plan.

The layer under it is a carrier fallback to a mobile, which works when anything above it does not.