Most Middle Tennessee leadership teams have a continuity plan somewhere. A shared drive. A binder. A PDF from last year's insurance review.
What they often don't have is a recent conversation about whether that plan still matches how the business actually runs.
September is National Preparedness Month. You don't need a half-day workshop to use it. You need 15 minutes, the people who own the critical parts of the business in the room, and a handful of blunt questions. Find the gaps while everyone's calm enough to fix them.
Why a Short Meeting Beats a Long Plan Nobody's Read
Plans fail in the first hour of an outage for ordinary reasons. The person named on page three left the company. The phone tree lists a vendor you dropped two years ago. Nobody agrees which system comes back first, so everyone tries to restore everything at once.
A 15-minute meeting won't replace a real disaster recovery plan. It'll tell you whether the one you already have is still true.
Treat it like a fire drill, not a workshop. No slides. Answers only.
Write down four names, not an org chart. Who starts the response. Who updates staff. Who talks to clients and customers. Who calls the IT provider, the internet carrier, or the landlord.
If two people think they own the same call, that's a gap. If nobody owns customer updates, that's a gap. Under pressure, unclear ownership gets expensive fast. People wait for permission, duplicate work, or invent a chain of command in Slack while the clock runs.
Say the names out loud in the room. If someone hesitates, you just found your first fix.
How You Reach Each Other When the Usual Tools Don't Work
Email and phones feel permanent right up until they're not. If staff couldn't open their inbox tomorrow, would they know where to look for instructions? If the phone system went down, how would customers actually reach anyone?
You need one backup path that still works when the normal ones don't. A cell roster, a text tree, a second domain, even a physical meetup point for a small office. Pick something real, and put it somewhere people will actually find it, not buried in a business continuity plan nobody opens twice a year.
List the functions that actually protect revenue, clients, and daily work. Be specific. "The server" isn't an answer. Billing, scheduling, client files, payments, or the one platform your team can't work without, those are answers.
Order matters. Trying to restore everything at once usually means the wrong thing comes up first, and the important thing waits behind it.
If you already have recovery targets on paper, this is where you check whether leadership still agrees with them. If you don't, this meeting is where the first draft starts. The deeper testing that confirms those targets are realistic belongs in your regular backup testing, not this meeting. This meeting decides what that testing needs to protect.
(opens in a new tab)Photo by Justin Harvey: 2010 Flood of Nashville, TN
The Dependency Nobody Wants to Name
Every business has one. One internet circuit. One bookkeeper who's the only person who actually understands invoicing. One SaaS platform holding scheduling, CRM, and files together. One employee who knows the workaround for a process that's never been documented.
That last one more crucial here than in a lot of markets. Local unemployment has held under 3 percent, and a small business trying to keep one internal IT person on staff is competing against HCA, Vanderbilt, and Amazon for that same hire. If your entire recovery depends on one person who happens to know how everything actually works, that's a plan built around someone else's ability to stay employed, stay healthy, or take a better offer.
If this meeting surfaces something you can't solve in-house, that's useful information too. Net Works helps Middle Tennessee businesses turn those gaps into a complete IT management approach that holds up under pressure.
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