Business Resilience, What to Have Ready Before You Need It

1. Know your runway

Committed costs for the next quarter, and cash available.

Divide one by the other. That is how many months you survive at zero revenue.

Most owners have never calculated this and are surprised by the answer in both directions.

2. Know your floor

Which costs are genuinely fixed and which you could stop within 30 days.

Do this in advance, on paper, calmly. Deciding it during a crisis produces bad choices made quickly.

3. Have a facility arranged before you need it

Lenders price panic accurately. A facility arranged when you do not need it costs less than the same facility arranged when you do, on better terms and with less scrutiny.

Arrange it, do not draw it.

4. Know who can sign if you cannot

Bank mandates, contracts, payroll authorisation.

If everything requires one person and that person is unreachable for three weeks, your business stops for reasons unrelated to the disruption.

This is the cheapest item on the list and the most commonly missing.

5. Reduce single points of failure

One customer above 30% of revenue.
One supplier with no alternative.
One person who holds the client relationships.
One system with no tested backup.

You will not fix all four. Knowing which you have is what lets you act quickly when one of them fails.

6. Have books current enough to decide from

In a disruption you need to know your position within a day.

A business that reconciles monthly can produce that. A business that reconciles annually cannot, and spends the first critical fortnight finding out where it stands.

This is the most underrated resilience measure there is.

7. Write down the three processes that must continue

Not a manual. Three pages.

How customers get invoiced. How suppliers get paid. How payroll runs.

Enough that someone else could do it. Most owners cannot produce this, and discovering that is itself useful.

What not to spend time on

A long continuity plan nobody has read. These get written to look complete and are never opened.

Scenario planning for events you cannot influence. Prepare for the effects, which are usually the same regardless of cause: revenue falls, cash tightens, somebody is unavailable.

The test

Ask what happens on Monday if your largest customer stops, your accounting system is unavailable for a week, or you are unreachable for a month.

Not what you would feel. What would actually happen, and who would do what.

If you have no answer to any of the three, that is where to start.

Where we fit

We produce the runway and committed cost analysis, and we keep client books current enough that the position can be established in a day rather than a fortnight.