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Our Unique Service Proposition.

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At Severn Bay Corporate Solutions, we arrange Continuity, Insurance and Risk Management solutions, for businesses and property owners, #becauseaccidentshappen to nice people all the time.

We TRUST you to disclose everything you know is important and you TRUST us to search out and find the best solution that meets your needs:

We will promise that:

  • All our communications will be clear and concise
  • We will get you the correct technical solution
  • At the lowest price available in the market
  • We will declare our fee up front so you can see that it is reasonable
  • We will save you up to 30% on your current spend

We will do this because we know it is the best way to GAIN or RETAIN clients for our business.

As wholly independent brokers, not tied to or beholden to any provider, we can search an extensive range of products, and tailor a solution to your specific needs.

We do that work for you, so you don’t have to waste precious time without the knowledge or experience to make value judgements about the suitability of what you purchase.

If you’d like a grown-up conversation about your requirements, one built on trust and a long-term relationship, just get in touch and speak to one of our professionally qualified advisers.

www.severnbay.com

Have a great day 😎

 

Testing Testing

Corporate Continuity – Part 6

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Now to make sure it all works, and we have enhanced operational resilience across the organisation.

The final stage in any good continuity plan is VALIDATION. We need to know that the programme will remain effective, because things change in any organisation and continued validation will ensure overall resilience is maintained.

Validation is achieved by Exercising, Maintenance and Review.

First we must develop an exercise process to meet the needs of the organisation. Exercises can come in a number of forms.

  1. Discussion based
  2. Scenario exercises
  3. Simulations
  4. Live situational
  5. Tests

Each type has its own characteristics and will fit a particular need but should always involve as much realism as possible. They should manage the risk of disruption to the business, and maximise costs and benefits.

Thorough planning and support is required. There should be a clear method to STOP the exercise if necessary and thorough debriefing is always required, followed by a detailed report.

These plans must be maintained over time, and reviewed regularly. Self-assessment, quality assurance, performance appraisals and supplier performance should be measured, and this should always be followed by a thorough management review, to #preserveprofitability

Now relax and enjoy the weekend

Implementation

Corporate Continuity – Part 5

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Do what you say you will do!

Once we have completed the first four stages of the continuity process:

  1. Policy & Programme Management
  2. Embedding continuity throughout the organisation
  3. Analysis of Business Impacts
  4. Designed solutions

We move on to the IMPLEMENTATION phase, which is where we actually bring continuity to life within the business, driving real change at all levels, so that continuity becomes “Business as Usual”.

To do this we have to:

  • Identify the responsible individuals
  • Develop a draft response structure for top management consideration
  • Document and publish the approved structure
  • Implement the structure within any current continuity plans
  • Rehearse the structure as part of the continuity plan

Response structures will depend on the size and complexity of the organisation and the number of locations. Response structures need to be developed at several levels within the organisations, these are:

  • Strategic – Top Management / Board Level
  • Tactical – Mid Level management at organisation or division level
  • Operational – Detailed operation plans, departments and locations

Responsibilities need to be agreed along with authorities, matching competencies, then implementing and rehearsing team capabilities. There also need s to be a maintenance schedule to update plans as required.

So, lets get this show on the road!

Have a great day

 

Design

Corporate Continuity – Part 4

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A solution designed for the specific business.

Once we have management buy in to business continuity objectives, have embedded the concept with staff and managers and have identified the key vulnerabilities, we go on to design the solution specific to the business.

The solution will of course depend on the nature of the organisation and the products and or services that it seeks to deliver. The solution designed for a manufacturing company, will differ dramatically from that of a home nation-based charity.

We will look at risk and threat assessments before we decide on the appropriate business continuity solutions. We will consider interdependencies within the business, especially where solutions may rely on suppliers and their supply chains.

We may look at existing arrangements and adjust them according to the “Minimum Business Continuity Objective”. Cost effectiveness will always be a consideration. Top management will of course need to sign off the appropriate solutions.

Solutions should be consolidated by resource type to ensure they are consistent across the organisation and do not conflict with other objectives.

Finally, we will establish the projects required to implement the solutions, so the organisation can #justkeepgoing.

When all is said and done designing the correct solutions is essential if the final plan is to be fir for purpose.

Have a great day

 

 

Risk analysis

Corporate Continuity – Part 3

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The devil is always in the detail.

And now the real work starts, we get down to the nitty gritty.

We’ve got management buy in and explained to the whole organisation why business continuity is important and now we have to deep dive into the organisation and look at the events which could interrupt it activities and the income stream.

In stage 3 we start off with and Analysis of key vulnerabilities. Some are easy to spot, like major physical damage and are taken care of by insurance, such as fire or flood. In almost all cases things we hadn’t considered, turn out to be the ones that need the most planning.

Here are just a few:

  • Death, incapacity of key personnel
  • Important team leaves to start a business
  • Loss of a major supplier or customer
  • Increased competition
  • Failure of critical machinery
  • Long lead times on key equipment
  • Political environment
  • New and more restrictive regulations
  • Major protests and civil disorder

The list is almost endless, but most important are the ones that will significantly interrupt the income stream of the business.

We grade each on for frequency and severity as well as potential impact in a detailed assessment and then rank them so we can start planning for these events, to make sure you can #justkeepgoing

What might appear obvious, often tends to be the lowest risk, and the things you never thought of are the worst.

Once identified we can start to consider these risks in detail and plan accordingly.

Have a great day

Meeting

Corporate Continuity – Part 2

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Embedding Continuity

How long will that take?

I really need to get this done quickly.

Once I have buy in from the top management in an organisation, I need to “embed” business continuity within it. To do this you almost need to talk to every member of staff, and at the very least all the middle management and operational managers.

They need to know that this is a core discipline within the business. Part of this process is reassuring them, that they will get adequate resource and support from their chain of command.

It is the operational and middle management that will have to implement the plans and activate response structures when things go wrong, whilst top management deal with communications, the press and reputational issues.

There are lots of ways to do this – seminars, training sessions, awareness campaigns, right down to toolbox talks on the shop floor.

So, to answer the first question, how long will it take?

This depends on the nature of the organisation, the number of staff and locations over which they operate, and it can be anything from 6 months, to 3 years.

Business Continuity is ongoing process which will lead to enhanced operational resilience at all levels and embedding that is absolutely critical.

Have a great day and watch out for part 3

Board

Business Continuity Part1

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Policy & Programme Management

Are you up for this?

Occasionally when I meet a client to discuss continuity planning, I am met with a board who have another agenda, but it becomes clear quickly. I either get enthusiastic buy in from the board or just one director has been delegated to deal with it and the remainder can’t get out of the room quick enough.

In these cases, the organisation is often “ticking a box” for a regulator or a customer. They want a continuity plan, because they need to show it to someone else, but they aren’t really interested in its impact within the business and certainly don’t want to waste time, personnel or resources on it.

I will always try to get the organisation to understand why resilience is so important and what my part is in achieving a solid result, so that continuity becomes “business as usual” within that organisation.

If I can’t, then I will respectfully decline the opportunity, as I will end up doing a bad job, purely because the client isn’t fully engaged  and that’s not good for my reputation.

The first step is always policy & programme management, and without enthusiastic buy in from the board, including a desire to achieve enhanced resilience and allocate appropriate resources to the task, the opportunity is lost on day one!

Want to know more just message me here.

Planning

BCP – Do you know what it means?

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In business we think about growth and development plans all the time. How are we going to get from where we are now, to where we want to be in 5, 10,15 or 20 years time. How do we structure our business to achieve those aims and goals?

We know there are many things that could happen to frustrate those goals, and we pick off the easy ones buying business insurances once a year and then forgetting about them, but what about those things you can’t insure?

Whilst some of them might cross our mind occasionally, businesses founders seldom set time aside to consider the implications and even more rarely plan for events and incidents that could seriously interrupt the activity that generates income.

Here are a few you may not have thought about:

  1. Failure of a key supplier or customer
  2. New competitor buying into the market
  3. Legal and regulatory changes
  4. Import export restrictions
  5. Failure of critical IT systems or production machinery
  6. Long lead times on acquiring critical equipment
  7. Sudden increased material costs and stock shortages
  8. Cyber-attacks and financial crimes
  9. Micro-biological contamination
  10. Internal teams leaving to set up business

All these things can and do happen from time to time. I know, as a business continuity advisor I look at them all the time and make sure businesses can #justkeepgoing when unforeseen events really do occur.

With a little planning and foresight, you can develop plans and response structures that can kick in the minute an incident occurs, so that you can continue your income generating activity with little or no disruption and that can be the difference between success or failure.

Resilience = Consideration + Planning + Implementation + Ongoing Validation

If you’d like to know more, have a look at our website www.severnbay.com or call on 029 20 470375.

Risk

What does “continuity” mean to you?

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Well, the dictionary definition is: “the unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over time.”

In business it means the ability to continue, with your income stream unaffected, through serious problems that would normally disrupt or halt activities.

These problems can fall into a number of different categories, but critically any number of things can not be insured and those are the ones you need effective plans to deal with.

These might include, competition, problems with suppliers or customers, changes in public policy and the law, equipment delays, infrastructure problems and the like.

Even the insurable risks only provide financial compensation after the event, and do not deal with “what you do” when the proverbial hits the fan.

BCP (Business Continuity Planning) is something every business should do, and the daft thing is, in small businesses its even more important and often quite simple.

The main steps are:

  • Policy & Programme Management
  • Embedding BC
  • Analysis
  • Design
  • Implementation
  • Design

Over the next few days, I will go through the 6 steps above to give you a taste of what it means to undertake meaningful BCP, #becauseaccidentshappen to nice people all the time.

If you like to have a chat about how a modest spend can give you almost complete peace of mind and savings elsewhere can often pay for it, just message me here, it might be the most valuable call you ever make in your business.

Have a great day 😊

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A women scorned!

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There are many risks in life and according to some, a women scorned is near the top, but then my wife would say, if I put myself in that position, I probably deserved it and whilst I might reflect thoughtfully, deep down I know she is right.

I once had a boss who everyone outside our organisation, thought was difficult to deal with, but they just didn’t know him. If you were on his team, he was unfailingly loyal. He was frank and honest and that was sometimes difficult to deal with, but he was never unreasonable. You were never going to get stabbed in the back and you would only be likely to get a punch in the face (figuratively speaking) if you were too stupid or too slow to get out of the way.

In business as in life there is a common thread.

If you are aware of the risks you can plan to avoid them, develop strategies to mitigate the worst consequences, or create policies and procedures that will deal with them as they arise and flatten out the costs involved, so that your business is not unduly interrupted.

When asked about the most difficult thing about being prime minister, Harold McMillan said, “Events dear boy, events!” Those things you never expect, but that happen anyway. For him it was the Suez crisis. You only have to look around the world in the last 5 years to see events that changed the world as we knew it.

So don’t wait for a stab in the back, face up to to the challenges, plan for them and when they do happen, as they most assuredly will, your business can continue confidently.

Want to know how a small investment in time and money can give you almost total peace of mind in your business, so you can #justkeepgoing and how often savings in one area can even pay for the work that needs to be done, so the net cost is neutral.

Message me here or call me on 029 20470 375.

(And yes, my wife is always right 😊)