September 2, 2026

September is National Preparedness Month. Most of the advice you will see this month is aimed at households: water, flashlights, a family meeting point. The same logic applies to your business, and it takes about as long.

You don’t need an all-day planning session. You need 15 minutes, the right people in the room, and five direct questions.

This post is that meeting. Put it on the calendar, work through the questions in order, and write down the answers.

Before you start

Three minutes per question, and no more. The point is not to solve anything in the room. It is to find out which answers your team already has and which ones you have been assuming.

Who should be there: whoever can make a decision without asking someone else. For most small businesses that is two to four people. The owner or general manager, whoever runs operations, and whoever owns the customer relationship.

What to bring: nothing. If someone has to look something up before they can answer, that is itself an answer worth writing down.

What to write down: one line per question, plus the name of the person who owns any follow-up. A meeting that produces no owner produces no change.

1. If our business stopped operating tomorrow, what would need to be restored first?

A vague answer sounds like: “Everything’s important. We would need it all back.”

A good answer sounds like: “Scheduling first, then payment processing, then email. Everything else can wait a day.”

The difference is that the second answer can be acted on at six in the morning by someone who cannot reach you. Recovery is a sequence, and if you have not decided the order in advance, your team will decide it under pressure.

2. Who makes the call during a disruption?

A vague answer sounds like: “We would all get on a call and figure it out.”

A good answer sounds like: “Dana decides priorities. If Dana is unreachable, Marcus does. Priya handles customer communication.”

Pressure exposes unclear ownership quickly. When people don’t know who can make the call, they wait for approval, duplicate work, or pull leaders into three separate conversations at once.

Name a backup for every role. The person who is hardest to reach during an outage is often the person who normally decides.

3. How would we reach each other if our normal tools were down?

A vague answer sounds like: “We would text, I guess.”

A good answer sounds like: “Everyone has the group text. The printed phone list is in the front office and in Dana’s car.”

Email, phones, and collaboration platforms feel dependable until they stop. If your team’s contact list lives only inside the system that is down, you don’t have a contact list.

4. What is our biggest single point of failure?

A vague answer sounds like: “We are pretty diversified.”

A good answer sounds like: “If Marcus is out and the ordering system is down at the same time, nobody else knows how to place a supplier order manually.”

Some risks hide in plain sight because they hold the business up quietly every day. One software platform, one internet connection, one vendor, or one person who knows a process nobody else fully understands.

5. What would we wish we had done today?

A vague answer sounds like: “Probably back things up more.”

A good answer sounds like: “Written down the manual ordering process, and confirmed that our backup actually restores.”

This question works because it puts your team inside the moment they are trying to avoid. Whatever comes out of it is your list, and it is usually shorter than people expect.

Where an IT provider fits

After 15 minutes you will know which answers were solid and which were assumptions.

The assumptions are where an IT partner earns their keep. Testing whether a backup actually restores, and how long it takes. Documenting the systems only one person understands. Confirming that a recovery plan holds up outside the document it is written in.

The point isn’t to make preparedness feel technical. It is to see how your systems, your people, and your processes actually work together when pressure hits.

Put it on the calendar

Fifteen minutes. Five questions. One owner for every follow-up.

If your leadership team answers all five clearly, you have a real sense of how the business would respond under pressure. If some answers wobble, you have found the gaps while they are still cheap to fix.

Schedule a discovery call with TechEx to pressure-test the answers you wrote down and turn the shaky ones into a recovery plan that works before you need it.

Call TechEx at 480-764-2837 or visit techex.co/discoverycall.