A business continuity plan template earns its place only if every section forces a decision. The one below is built for firms of roughly 10 to 250 people: eleven sections, each with the blanks to fill in and the question the finished section has to answer. Fill it in with the people who run each function, keep the main plan to 10 or 15 pages plus appendices, and staff can follow it on a bad morning without phoning you first.
For the reasoning behind each part, and how a plan maps to ISO 22301, our annotated business continuity plan table of contents is the long-form reference. This page is the working copy, with a filled-in example for a fictional 35-person distributor.
Three decisions before you fill anything in
Who writes which section. The plan owner drafts sections 1 to 4 and 11. Each function head writes its own rows in section 2 and its own workaround in section 7. A plan written by one person for everyone else tends to be ignored by everyone else.
Where the numbers come from. Section 2 needs a recovery target for every priority activity. Without a business impact analysis, a two-hour workshop with function heads produces usable first numbers; our guide to a business impact analysis people actually finish covers the fuller version.
Where the copies live. One controlled electronic copy outside your main file share, plus printed copies held by named people at home.
The template
Copy the headings into your own document. Square brackets mark what you fill in. The "Must answer" line is the test: if the section cannot answer it, the section is not finished.
1. Plan control
[Company name, legal entities and sites covered] [What is excluded, and why] [Plan owner and deputy] [Version number, approval date, approved by] [Next review date] [Where the controlled copy and each printed copy are kept]
Must answer: what does this plan cover, and is the copy in your hand the current one?
2. Priority activities and recovery targets
One row per activity, most urgent first. Five to ten rows is normal for a small firm; thirty usually means you have listed tasks.
| Activity | Owner and alternate | Can stop for at most | Minimum acceptable level | Data loss tolerated | Depends on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [e.g. taking customer orders] | [names] | [hours or days] | [e.g. top accounts only] | [e.g. last hour] | [people, systems, suppliers, site] |
Must answer: what comes back first, how fast, and at what level? The "can stop for" column is the maximum tolerable period of disruption. The recovery time objective you give IT must be shorter, with room to catch up; see setting RTO and RPO without guesswork.
3. Who is in charge
[Incident lead and two alternates] [Who can approve spending during an incident, and how much] [Who speaks to staff, customers, the insurer and the media] [Where the team meets if the office is closed, plus a fallback channel that does not need company email]
Must answer: if the incident lead cannot be reached within 30 minutes, who takes over, and do they know it?
4. Invoking the plan
[Trigger events: site unusable for half a day, a priority system down past half its tolerance, a key supplier unable to deliver] [Who can declare] [First-hour checklist: people safe, team assembled, first staff message, site decision]
Must answer: who can say "we are running the plan now," and what happens in the next 60 minutes?
5. People and safety
[Reference to your evacuation or emergency action plan] [How staff are accounted for in the office, at home and traveling] [Minimum staffing for each priority activity, with named cross-trained backups]
Must answer: how do you know within an hour that everyone is safe, and who does each priority activity when its usual person is out?
6. Losing the workplace
[Where each team works if the building is closed: home, another site, a partner's space] [Equipment needed and its source] [How phones, mail and deliveries are redirected]
Must answer: where is everyone working tomorrow morning, and what do they need to do it?
7. Losing systems and data
[Systems each priority activity needs, with the RTO and RPO agreed with IT] [Where each system's data lives and who can restore it] [The manual workaround for each priority activity, and how long it can carry the load] [Reference to the IT disaster recovery plan and its owner]
Must answer: if the main system is down for two days, how do you keep trading, and how do you catch up afterward?
8. Suppliers and customers
[Critical suppliers with account numbers, emergency contacts and a second source] [Contract terms that matter: delivery commitments, force majeure] [Customers who must hear from you directly]
Must answer: which outside party could stop you, and what is plan B for each one?
9. Communications
[Each audience and who contacts it] [Channels: mass text, phone tree, email, website notice] [Two or three pre-approved holding statements] [Who approves anything said publicly]
Must answer: what do staff and customers hear in the first two hours, from whom, and by which channel if email is down?
10. Contacts and vital records (appendix)
[Staff list with personal phone numbers] [Utilities, insurer with policy number and claims line, bank, IT provider, landlord, key suppliers and customers] [Vital records: contracts, policies, licenses, and where originals and copies are kept]
Must answer: could someone holding only the printed copy reach every party they need?
11. Testing and upkeep
[Exercise schedule: at least one tabletop a year, a contact-list check each quarter] [Changes that force an update: a move, a new system or key supplier, a named person leaving] [Change log]
Must answer: when was this plan last exercised, and what changed because of it?
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Worked example: a fictional 35-person distributor
This company is invented to show a filled-in plan, and every figure is illustrative. It is a wholesale food distributor with 35 staff: 9 in the office, 14 in the warehouse, 10 drivers and 2 owners. It runs on a cloud ordering and routing system and a hosted accounting package, from one leased warehouse with a cold room.
Section 2, filled in for its top five activities:
| Activity | Can stop for at most | Minimum level | Data loss tolerated | Depends on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taking and confirming orders | 1 trading day | Standing orders plus phone orders from the top 60 accounts | 1 hour | Ordering system, phones, 2 trained order takers |
| Cold storage | 4 hours | Product held at safe temperature | Not applicable | Power, refrigeration contractor, rental refrigerated trailer |
| Picking and delivery | 1 trading day | Restaurant and school routes only | 1 hour of pick lists | Ordering system, 6 drivers, 4 trucks, fuel cards |
| Invoicing and collections | 5 trading days | Large accounts invoiced by hand | 1 trading day | Accounting package, finance lead |
| Payroll | 3 days before payday | Repeat last period's amounts | 1 pay period | Payroll provider, bank |
The owners priced the first row before arguing about it. They put annual revenue at $9 million over a trading week of about 50 hours (2,600 hours a year). With the ordering system down and no workaround, about 80 percent of revenue stops, and they reckon half of that comes back later as late orders. Twenty staff lose half their productivity, at a loaded $32 an hour. The downtime cost calculator turns that into about $1,705 for each trading hour: roughly $1,385 of lost revenue and $320 of idle time. One ten-hour trading day, plus $2,500 of overtime and courier costs, comes to about $19,546. Three trading days with the same one-off costs come to about $53,638.
Those numbers paid for the workaround in section 7. Every Friday the order desk prints the standing-order list and next week's routes. If the system fails, order takers work from the printout and a paper pad, drivers run printed route sheets, and two people key the paper orders in afterward. A trial run on a quiet afternoon showed it carried the restaurant routes but not the schools, whose orders change daily, so schools now have a shared spreadsheet as backup.
The rest of the plan, in brief:
- Section 3. The operations owner leads, with the finance lead and the warehouse supervisor as alternates. Either owner can approve up to $25,000 without a meeting.
- Section 4. Triggers: warehouse unusable for more than two hours, cold-room alarm not cleared within 30 minutes, ordering system down at 10 a.m. on a delivery day.
- Section 6. A rental agreement for a refrigerated trailer and a written overflow arrangement with a non-competing distributor 40 miles away. Office staff work from home.
- Section 9. A pre-approved customer text: standing orders arrive as normal, and changes go to a named phone number.
Format: what a usable sample looks like on paper
Most business continuity plan samples fail on format, not content. Keep the main plan short and push changeable detail into appendices: contact lists change monthly, the decision about who leads does not, so you can reissue one page instead of the whole plan.
Put a one-page summary at the front with who leads, the top activities and their limits, the first-hour checklist and the bridge number. During an incident, most people will read only that page. Keep an editable file and a dated PDF, and print the PDF. Ready.gov's business continuity planning page offers a free plan template in PDF and exercise materials you can adapt once the plan exists.
Mistakes people make with a template
- Filling every blank. A section that does not apply should say so in one line. Generic padding hides the sections that matter.
- Copying someone else's sample. Their priority activities and tolerances are not yours.
- Naming no alternates. One name per role is a plan for a day when nobody is sick, on leave or stuck in traffic.
Readiness kit
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|---|---|---|---|
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| Document safe | SentrySafe fire and water resistant file box | Holds the printed plan, insurance papers and recovery keys where a fire or a leak will not reach them. | Shop on Amazon |
Matched to this topic from manufacturer specifications and published reviews; not tested by us. See the full Readiness kit
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a business continuity plan template and an example?
A template is the empty structure: headings, blanks and prompts. An example shows it filled in for one organization, which helps you judge the level of detail. Use the example only as a guide, because another firm's activities and limits will not match yours.
How long should a small business continuity plan be?
For a firm of 10 to 50 people, 10 to 15 pages plus appendices is usually enough, with a one-page summary in front. The test is whether a staff member could follow it without asking the author.
Do I need a business impact analysis before using this template?
You need its outputs: priority activities, how long each can stop and how much data loss each can absorb. A short workshop with function heads can produce first estimates for section 2. Replace them with a fuller analysis within the year.
Is there a free business continuity plan template from the government?
Yes. Ready.gov, run by FEMA, publishes a business continuity plan template in PDF along with exercise materials. You will still need to add your own activities, contacts and workarounds.
