Business Continuity Plan Template for Small Businesses (Houston Hurricane-Season Edition).

Quick Answer: A business continuity plan lists what your business must keep doing, how fast each system must come back (RTO), how much data you can lose (RPO), who calls whom, which vendors you depend on, how to restore from backup, where people work if the office is unusable, and when you test it all. The template below has every section with fill-in fields, followed by a filled-in example for a fictional 20-person Houston office. The Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30 (National Weather Service), so now is the time to write it. Backup and recovery is part of our managed IT services in Houston.

Houston businesses know what a bad week looks like: floodwater in a ground-floor server closet, a power outage that outlasts the generator, staff who cannot get to the office. The businesses that recover fastest are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who wrote it down before it happened.

This guide gives you a template you can copy and fill in, an example of what a completed one looks like, and the official sources behind the approach. It is written for businesses of roughly 5 to 100 people with no dedicated continuity manager. If you want help carrying it out, our IT support and cybersecurity teams do this for Houston businesses.

What the official sources say

We use official sources for the concepts rather than blog summaries.

• Hurricane season dates. The National Weather Service states that the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30 each year, and that in an average season the region sees 14 tropical storms, 7 of which become hurricanes (National Weather Service, hurricane safety, read 2026-11-01). It also lists storm surge, inland flooding from heavy rain and destructive winds among the main hazards. For Houston, inland flooding is the one that most often reaches an office.
• Business continuity planning. Ready.gov describes the work as organising a business continuity team and compiling a plan to manage a business disruption, and breaks it into six stages: prepare, define, identify, develop, teams and test (Ready.gov, business continuity plan, read 2026-11-01).
• Business impact analysis. Ready.gov defines a business impact analysis (BIA) as something that "predicts the consequences of a disruption to your business, and gathers information needed to develop recovery strategies." It includes identifying critical business processes and resources, and prioritising the order in which functions are restored (Ready.gov, business impact analysis, read 2026-11-01). Section 2 of our template is a simple BIA.
• IT and testing. Ready.gov's business guidance names "IT support and recovery" and communications planning as parts of preparedness, and says "training, testing and exercises are essential components of preparedness" (Ready.gov, business, read 2026-11-01).
• Local alerts. The City of Houston Office of Emergency Management asks residents to register for emergency alerts through AlertHouston, which can reach you by email, text or voice call (Houston OEM, read 2026-11-01). Ready Harris offers alert sign-up, hurricane evacuation zone and route maps, and preparedness guides for residents and businesses (Ready Harris, read 2026-11-01).

One more note on timing. If you are reading this in November, the season is nearly over, which makes it the best time to write the plan. You have until June 1 to fill in the blanks and test it.

How to use the template

1. Copy sections 1 to 9 into a document your whole leadership team can open.
2. Fill in every field. If you do not know an answer, write "unknown, owner: [name], due: [date]." An honest gap is more useful than a blank.
3. Print one copy and keep one off-site or in a place you can reach without your network. A plan stored only on the server that failed is not a plan.
4. Review it twice a year: once before June 1 and once after the season ends.

The "RTO" and "RPO" terms matter most, so here they are in plain language:

• RTO (recovery time objective): how long this function or system can be down before it seriously hurts the business.
• RPO (recovery point objective): how much recent work you can afford to lose. If you back up nightly, your RPO is up to a day. If that is too much, you need more frequent backups.

The template

Section 1. Plan basics

Section 2. Critical functions (your business impact analysis)

List every function that brings in money, meets a legal duty or keeps people safe. For each one, ask: if this stopped for a day, a week, a month, what would happen?

Include the non-obvious: payroll, phones, the front door lock, the card terminal, the line-of-business application, email.

Section 3. RTO and RPO per system

Rule of thumb: the shorter the RTO and RPO, the more the protection costs. Set them by the impact in Section 2, not by guessing.

Section 4. Contact tree

Use mobile numbers and a personal email. Work email may be the thing that is down.

Add a line for the building manager, your insurance agent and your attorney. Test the tree once a year by actually calling.

Section 5. Vendor list

Do not write passwords in this document. Write where they are kept, such as "company password manager, vault Operations," and make sure two people can open it.

Section 6. Backup and restore steps

The test is the part people skip. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. If your cloud tenant is Microsoft 365, read our Microsoft 365 guide for the backup point.

Section 7. Alternate work site and remote work

Section 8. Communication plan

Write the first draft of each message now. Use a plain, calm tone: what happened, what you are doing, when you will update next. Register staff for local alerts through AlertHouston and Ready Harris, and check your evacuation zone on the Ready Harris site.

Section 9. Testing schedule

After every test, write down what failed and who fixes it by when. Ready.gov lists testing as the sixth stage of the process for good reason: the plan only becomes real when it has survived a rehearsal.

Example: a filled-in plan for a fictional 20-person Houston office

This is an example only. "Example Title Co." is a made-up company used to show how the template reads when completed. The recovery times and choices below are illustrative, not recommendations for your business. Set yours from your own impact analysis.

Profile. 20 employees in a two-storey office, ground-floor server closet, Microsoft 365 for email and files, a cloud-based escrow software, VoIP phones, laptops for all staff.

Example Section 1. Plan basics

Example Section 2. Critical functions

Example Section 3. RTO and RPO

The legacy file server sits in a ground-floor closet. The plan states that the move to cloud storage is a priority project, and until then a nightly off-site copy is kept outside the building.

Example Section 4. Contact tree (abbreviated)

Office Manager calls the Controller, the IT provider and the Closing Manager. The Closing Manager calls the three closers. The Controller calls the two accountants and the bank contact. Each person calls two others. Everybody confirms by text. The tree is tested by phone each May.

Example Section 5. Vendor list (abbreviated)

Internet provider (primary) and a cellular hotspot as a backup, a VoIP provider with a call-forwarding setting that the Office Manager can change from a phone, the escrow software vendor with a named support contact, the IT provider, the bank's business line and the insurance agent. The password vault holds every login, and two people can open it.

Example Section 6. Backup and restore

Cloud data is backed up hourly by a third-party tool. The legacy file server is backed up nightly locally and to an off-site cloud copy. One copy cannot be deleted by a normal user account. The IT provider runs a restore of one mailbox and one shared folder each quarter and reports the time taken. The Office Manager holds the restore runbook on paper.

Example Section 7. Alternate work

All 20 staff have company laptops and MFA on their phones. If the office is closed, everyone works from home using the cloud tools. Closers who need physical signing use a shared conference room booked in advance at a neighbouring business. The office phone number forwards to mobiles. Laptops go home on any day a storm warning is in force, and equipment in the office is raised off the floor.

Example Section 8. Communication

A short status message is pre-written for the website banner, the voicemail greeting and an email to clients. The Office Manager sends it. Staff get a text from the contact tree. Staff are registered for AlertHouston and Ready Harris alerts, and each person knows their own evacuation zone.

Example Section 9. Testing

Quarterly restore, a yearly contact-tree call in May, a yearly tabletop walk-through in May ("the ground floor is flooded and the building is closed for a week"), and a yearly remote-work day.

Hurricane-season checklist for a Houston office

Do these before June 1, in this order.

1. Check your evacuation zone and your building's flood exposure through Ready Harris. Move equipment off the ground floor if you can.
2. Sign up for local alerts for the whole team (AlertHouston, Ready Harris).
3. Confirm one backup copy is off-site, outside the building and outside the area a storm would affect together.
4. Run a real restore of one system and write down the time.
5. Charge the plan: UPS batteries healthy, laptops charged, chargers taken home.
6. Test remote access for every person, including a second MFA method if a phone is lost.
7. Forward the phones in advance on storm days and confirm calls reach mobiles.
8. Photograph the office and equipment for insurance, and check that your policy covers what you expect, including flood and business interruption. Ask your agent; do not assume.
9. Print the plan and put one copy where you can reach it without power.
10. Walk through the plan with the team once. Fix what confuses people.

Where IT fits in the plan

Continuity is a whole-business plan, but the IT sections are usually the ones that fail first, and the ones where an outside team helps most.

• Backup and disaster recovery is part of our Managed IT tier, alongside network and firewall management, onsite support and quarterly strategy reviews. Restores are tested, not assumed.
• Security matters because a ransomware attack is a disaster too, and a backup the attacker can delete is not a backup. See our ransomware protection guide and our cybersecurity services.
• Costs and scope. For what backup and recovery add to a managed IT bill, see our managed IT services pricing guide.
• Strategy. A continuity plan is a natural item for a technology roadmap. Our vCIO guide explains who owns that conversation.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on your plan, we review it as part of our free IT assessment. See managed IT services in Houston, our cybersecurity services or contact us. Houston IT Developers has served Houston businesses since 2005 and is BBB accredited.

FAQ

What should a small business continuity plan include?

A list of critical functions, how quickly each must be back (recovery time) and how much data you can afford to lose (recovery point), a contact tree, a vendor list, backup and restore steps, an alternate work plan, a communication plan and a testing schedule. The template in this guide covers each one.

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

A business continuity plan covers how the whole business keeps operating through a disruption: people, premises, suppliers and communication. A disaster recovery plan is the IT part: how systems and data are restored. BCDR plans combine the two.

What are RTO and RPO?

RTO (recovery time objective) is how long a system or function can be down before it hurts the business. RPO (recovery point objective) is how much recent data you can afford to lose, which sets how often you must back up.

When is hurricane season in Houston?

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, according to the National Weather Service. The best time to write or update your plan is before June 1.

How often should I test my business continuity plan?

Ready.gov treats testing as an essential step of continuity planning. A practical schedule is a restore test of your backups every quarter and a walk-through of the full plan at least once a year, before hurricane season.