Business continuity plan template for Queensland small business.

A business continuity plan is a short written document that sets out what could stop your business trading, what you would do about it and who does what. For a business of five to fifty people it should run to a handful of pages. If yours is longer than that, nobody will open it on the day.

What a business continuity plan must contain

• Your critical activities: the three to five things that would stop the money if they stopped.
• What each activity depends on: people, premises, power, internet, systems and suppliers.
• Your loss scenarios: power, premises, personnel, internet, communications and hostile events.
• A step-by-step action checklist per scenario, written for whoever is on shift.
• A contact list that actually dials: staff, key suppliers, insurer, IT provider, landlord and bank.
• Recovery time targets: how long you can survive without each thing before it hurts.
• A review date and an owner's name.

The Queensland parts most templates miss

Generic Australian templates are written for a national office worker. Queensland businesses trade through cyclone season in the north, storm and flash flooding in the south east, extended grid outages after a system passes, and long summer stretches where heat alone takes out refrigeration and site work. A plan that doesn't name those conditions is not really a Queensland plan.

• Cyclone and severe weather: pre-season checks, shutdown triggers, when you close and who decides.
• Flood: whether the exposure is your premises, your staff's route to work or your supplier's route.
• Extended power outage: generator, fuel, cold chain and EFTPOS fallback.
• Road and freight closure. Bruce Highway cuts affect far more businesses than plan for them.
• Brisbane 2032 build works: access, congestion, labour competition and subcontractor availability.

How long it should take

One sitting. Two or three hours with the right people in the room, usually the owner, whoever runs operations and whoever knows where things are kept. Anything that turns into a twelve-month project stops being a plan.

"A three-page plan your team can follow beats a forty-page plan nobody has read."

Worked example: a 14-person landscaping business in Ipswich

The owner sat down with her leasing manager and the yard foreman for two hours on a Wednesday afternoon. They identified four critical activities: quoting and scheduling, running crews to site, invoicing, and maintaining the ute and plant fleet. Against each they listed what it depended on: a shared calendar system, four utes and two trailers, a single Xero login held by the office manager, and diesel supply for the mowers during a fuel shortage. They scored six scenarios and found two that actually mattered for them, a stolen or crashed ute taking out a crew for a week, and the office manager being unavailable during BAS week. The whole plan ran to four pages. Total cost was two afternoons and a $340 replacement key cut for a spare ute, which turned out to be the single highest-value line item in the plan.

A Queensland scenario: the plan in action

In February a Bundaberg engineering supplier lost power for 36 hours after a severe storm cell. The business had written a continuity plan four months earlier as part of a ResilientQLD app. The plan named a backup generator hire company, listed the three customers with the tightest delivery windows and gave the operations manager pre-agreed authority to quote a 48-hour delay without checking with the owner. Because those decisions were already made, the business lost half a day of productive time instead of the two to three days a comparable supplier down the road lost while waiting for the owner to return from a family trip and make each call himself.

Common mistakes that cost money

• Writing the plan once and never updating it. A plan with a phone number for a supplier who closed eighteen months ago is worse than no plan, because it creates false confidence.
• Making the plan too long to read under pressure. If it takes longer than five minutes to find the answer, it will not get used on the day.
• Naming a single decision-maker with no deputy. If the owner is the only person who can call a closure and the owner is unreachable, the business waits.
• Treating the plan as a compliance document instead of an operating one. The businesses that get value from a plan use it in the first ten minutes of a bad morning, not once a year at renewal.
• Skipping the test. A plan that has never been walked through with the actual team will have gaps nobody has found yet.

What good looks like

A good continuity plan fits on four to six pages, names real people rather than job titles where it can, has been read aloud in a room at least once, and gets reviewed every quarter in under twenty minutes. It answers three questions fast: what has happened, who decides what we do, and what do we tell the people who are asking. If your plan does all three, it is doing its job regardless of how it looks.

Where a template stops working

A template gives you the shape. What it cannot do is keep the plan current, put the right phone numbers one tap away on the day, or hand a checklist to a staff member at 6am. Our ResilientQLD app get the plan finished in a room with other Queensland operators, and the app keeps it alive afterwards.

How often should a business continuity plan be updated?

Every quarter for a fifteen-minute check, and immediately after any material change: a new premises, a new key supplier, a new system, or a key person leaving. Most plans go stale within a year of being written because nobody assigned the review to a calendar date, so put the date in the plan itself.

Do I need a business continuity plan by law in Queensland?

Most small businesses have no direct legal requirement to hold a continuity plan, though regulated sectors such as aged care, disability services and some financial services do. Increasingly, however, insurers, banks and larger customers are asking for one as a condition of cover or contract, which functions as a practical requirement even where the law is silent.

What's the difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan?

A business continuity plan covers the whole business: people, premises, suppliers and communication. A disaster recovery plan is narrower and usually refers specifically to restoring IT systems and data after an outage or attack. Most small businesses need both, but the continuity plan is the one that decides whether you keep trading while the technical recovery happens.

How much does a business continuity plan cost to put together?

For a business doing it themselves, the real cost is time rather than money, usually two to four hours of a leadership team's time plus whatever it costs to fix the gaps the exercise reveals, such as a spare key, a second supplier or a tested backup. A facilitated workshop with an outside provider typically runs a half day and costs less than a single week of lost trade during an unplanned closure.

Related reading: the one-page continuity plan that fits on a fridge, how to build a risk register for a small business and our cyclone season checklist for Queensland businesses.