In our recent blog Business Continuity Planning: How prepared are you to mitigate risk?, we looked at why it is essential to identify risks, prioritise them and develop contingency plans for each eventuality. But how do you do that exactly?

 Let’s get structured: Use the tools

Don’t feel daunted, there are two brilliant tools that can help you to structure your business continuity planning and identify what needs to be done:

1. The Business SWOT Canvas

Use this to look beyond your own business and identify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that you may not have considered.

The tried and tested SWOT canvas can be used to explore these four key factors:

Strengths

• Things your company does well;

• Qualities that set you apart from the competition;

• Internal resources, such as skilled, knowledgeable staff;

• Tangible assets, including intellectual property, capital and technology.

Weaknesses

• Things your company lacks;

• Things your competitors to better than you;

• Resource limitations;

• Unclear unique selling proposition.

Opportunities

• Underserved markets for specific products;

• Few competitors in your area;

• Emerging need for your products or services;

• Press/media coverage of your company.

Threats

• Emerging competitors;

• Changing regulatory environment;

• Negative press/media coverage;

• Changing customer attitudes toward your company.

Always plan for if your environment changes or your threat worsens and involve your team, suppliers and key stakeholders so that everyone is primed to take action. 

2. Business Continuity Canvas

This tool is great for exploring how your business works, rather than how you think it does.

It highlights how you operate, deliver activity, use resources and implement activities and helps identify contingencies you may need to plan for.

As a working example, consider the implications for your business of the Covid-19 on your:

• Customers

• Offer (value proposition)

• Marketing

• Customer services

• Key resources

• Key activities

• Key partners

• On finances – revenues and costs

The model breaks it down into three components:

1. Infrastructure – this may change if you’re involved in delivery and supply chain.

2. Offer – this may have to change or diversify.

3. Viability – this will be affected by revenue streams and cost structure, which are dictated by infrastructure and offer.

What is changing?

• Customer segments - Talk to your customers and find out how they have been affected. A change in their behaviour may necessitate a change in the way you do business with them. Understanding this will help to identify risks and adjustments you may have to make to your value proposition. 

Pro tip

Don’t lose the fit between what your customers need and what you offer. You need to review the benefits you bring and how you can maintain them so that customers don’t look elsewhere.

• Channels - How do you deliver your offer and how can you adapt to changes that contingencies may force in the way your customer engages with you? Think about how your customer finds out about you and can experience your product. Will that change? How can you enable them to evaluate your offer in a way that enables them to make good purchasing decisions?

• Customer relationships - How can you maintain them? Face to face meetings may not be possible at the moment, what about in the future. What does your customer expect, now?  Are people used to Zoom now, rather than mobile phones? Do you need more emails? Are customers becoming more needy? How can you reassure them? 

All of the above activities deliver your revenue stream. How do you adapt and find different ways and offerings that meet the challenges that your customer is facing?

How do you protect your revenue streams?

A few questions worth asking yourself are:

• Can you make it easier for customers to make a purchase? For instance, can you offer lease or rental rather than outright purchase for high value items? Or interest-free credit arrangements to spread the cost?

• Can you source your resources - the products or services you need for your value proposition - in a way that has a positive impact on costs, or reduces risks to the business?

• Can key activities be done differently, outsourced or even got rid of entirely to reduce your expenses?

• Are some expenses going up and, if so, what can you do to reduce them?

Consider Pareto Law's 80/20 Principle, can you streamline your 20 per cent? It’s time to get ruthless and review what can be outsourced or done away with completely.

How can you safeguard viability?

Remember, business viability is dictated by the choices you make. Contingencies may have an existential impact on your business. Depending on the risk, you may need to change your offer or your infrastructure to maintain viability. That’s the job of business owners and leaders.

Stay positive!

It’s a challenging time for organisations of every size, but there’s good news!

Small businesses and their owners tend to be good at making decisions quickly in the face of adversity. They are usually flexible and respond more rapidly than larger organisations so they can react as things emerge.

This means that for SMEs, ‘reactive’ can be an effective approach to crisis management, which isn’t always an option that’s open to bigger businesses.

If you need help with your business’ contingency planning or support and advice about how to safeguard your business against risk, drop us a line for a confidential, no-obligation chat steve@askingbetterquestions.co.uk.