When the Unexpected Happens, Are You Ready?

Most businesses don’t fail during a disaster because they lacked resources. They fail because they assumed the disaster wouldn’t happen to them.

A once-in-75-year ice storm hits Texas. Wildfires tear through California. A hurricane makes landfall in a city that hasn’t seen one in half a century. A fiber line gets cut outside an office building in rural Missouri. The power goes out after a storm and doesn’t come back on for days.

In each of these cases, someone, somewhere, was confident it wouldn’t happen to them.

The Overconfidence Problem

I feel like business continuity plans sometimes fail as overconfidence. We see a lot of customers that are so certain, you know, if a fiber line gets cut outside their office building, they’re confident that it’ll be repaired within a few hours. If if power goes out after a storm, they’re confident there’s no way it’ll be multiple days without power. Right? And so they just assume that it’s not gonna happen to them. Right? They assume like, we’ve got this. It’s it’s never happened before in the in the twenty years we’ve been here. It’s not gonna happen now. And again, those are the customers that are surprised. I’ve had a customer in rural Missouri be very confident that their network would be fine if they had a network outage. A year later, they were calling us for connectivity recovery because their network was out and it wasn’t coming back online.

One of the most common failure modes in business continuity isn’t a bad plan; it’s overconfidence in a plan that’s never been tested. We regularly see businesses that are certain a fiber cut will be repaired in a few hours, that a multi-day power outage simply won’t happen to them, or that because nothing has gone wrong in 20 years, nothing will.

Those are exactly the businesses that get surprised.

There’s another layer to this risk that often goes unexamined: population growth and infrastructure strain. If your state has seen a significant influx of residents since the pandemic, your grid and your network are under more pressure than they were the last time a major disruption hit. The resilience your community counted on five or 10 years ago may not be the resilience you have today.

The unprecedented events are the ones that expose the gaps, and increasingly, unprecedented is becoming the new normal.

Testing Isn’t Optional — It’s the Plan

A business continuity plan that lives in a binder is not a plan. It’s a document. The difference between the two is whether you’ve actually tested it.

Business continuity testing takes different forms depending on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re looking to verify employee knowledge or meet a compliance requirement, a virtual tabletop exercise may be exactly what you need — efficient, accessible, and easy to schedule across teams. But if your concern is technical — failover capabilities, network routing, server restoration, security infrastructure — then you need to get off-site and actually stress test the systems.

Auditors, particularly in regulated industries like financial services, know the difference. Off-site testing at a dedicated recovery facility carries real weight because it demonstrates that your organization can actually operate outside its primary environment, not just that it has a plan that says it can.

The best practice is straightforward: test routinely and set the date early. If you run an annual test, book the following year’s date before you leave the current one, even if it’s tentative. Put a marker on the calendar that your organization, your recovery partner, and any third-party vendors or MSPs can all work toward. A test with no date is just a good intention.

What Happens When You Actually Declare

When a disaster does occur and a business needs to declare, the first phone call tells us everything about how prepared they are.

For businesses that have tested regularly, that call is calm and efficient. They know where they want assets delivered and how they want equipment staged. They’ve done the site surveys and established the contacts. The recovery can move fast because the groundwork was already laid.

So Luke, you know, you’ve been doing this a while. What what happens when a customer declares? Like walk me through that first phone call and the steps that happen after that. In order to declare disaster, basically call agility. You’ll speak with someone on my team, a recovery manager. From that standpoint, we will do a full discovery. We’ll do a full deep dive. What are you experiencing? You know, what what are you anticipating or what has happened to your business? What do you need from agility? Once our customer signs off on that and they approve that plan, then agility goes to work and we execute. So I’ve seen customers that test multiple times with us annually and if they ever need to declare disaster, if they’re experiencing any kind of interruption, they’re always prepared. They know exactly where they want the assets delivered, where they want them staged. They may even know how exactly they want them packaged. Right? We know all the site requirements, we know who to contact. It makes the recovery so seamless compared to those customers that maybe they haven’t tested with us or maybe they haven’t gone through, they haven’t had us do a site survey of their, recovery environment or their their office space, right? That is a much different conversation, much higher stress levels. Yeah. So they got to be prepared and that’s what we’re here for is to help them be prepared.

For businesses that haven’t tested, that call is a different conversation entirely: higher stress, slower decisions, and more variables to sort through in real time, which is the worst possible time to sort through them.

The declaration process itself is straightforward: you call, speak with a recovery manager, and go through a full discovery of what you’re experiencing and what you need. Once a recovery plan is approved, the team executes. But the speed and smoothness of that execution is directly tied to the preparation that happened long before the disaster.

Recovery Is About More Than the Business

There’s a broader lens worth applying here, especially for organizations that serve communities directly. When a bank or credit union goes down, it’s not just the institution and its employees that are affected; it’s every customer who needs access to their money, their accounts, and their financial services.

That’s why the culture of recovery matters as much as the logistics. Rolling assets at two in the morning to get a business back up and running isn’t just operational diligence; it’s a commitment to the people on the other side of that business. The teams doing that work are relentlessly driving results and they don’t stop until the job is done.

We’re dealing with a situation where we’ve got to recover, let’s say a bank. We’re not just considering the bank and the bank’s employees but we’re also considering the people that are in that community that need to utilize the bank. The banking customers. So we really try to put our customer lens on and I would also say one thing that I push every day with my team is persistence. Like no quit. Right? So if we’re rolling in recovery assets at two in the morning to get a business up and running, they’re going to be aware of that. They’re gonna be working on that. If they don’t hear anything from our hauler when they’re delivering those resources, they’re calling. They’re calling, they’re lighting me up, they’re driving results constantly, they are relentless in doing that and I think our customers really respect that and appreciate that.

“No quit” isn’t just a mindset. It’s what recovery looks like in practice.

The Bottom Line

Business continuity isn’t about predicting exactly what will go wrong. It’s about accepting that something will and deciding now — while there’s time to prepare — what your response will look like.

Test your plan, off-site if your technology requires it. Set the date, involve your vendors, and know your recovery environment before you need it.

The businesses that recover fastest aren’t the ones with the best luck. They’re the ones that prepared.