September 14, 2026
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
If a disruption hit your business tomorrow, would you know exactly what to do?
Most leaders say yes. However, most businesses find out the hard way that the answer is no.
Here’s the thing: those gaps in communication, preparation, and decision-making always exist. A crisis is just the first time you see them, and by then, there’s no time to fix them.
September is National Preparedness Month, so let’s fix that now. And no, you don’t need an all-day offsite. You need 15 minutes, your leadership team, and to ask these five honest questions.
1. If we stopped operating tomorrow, what comes back first?
You already know which tools you rely on every day. But recovery isn’t about restoring everything, it’s about restoring the right things first.
What protects your customers, your revenue and your team’s ability to keep working? Customer support? Payment processing? Order fulfillment? Access to critical files?
The answer is different for every business. The goal is the same: know what can’t sit idle, so your team isn’t trying to boil the ocean while the clock runs.
2. Who makes the call when things go wrong?
Pressure exposes unclear ownership fast. When nobody knows who’s in charge, people wait for approval, duplicate each other’s work, or drag leaders into five separate conversations, all while the response stalls.
Your team should already know who kicks off the response, who updates employees, who talks to customers, and who deals with vendors and IT partners. This isn’t about building a corporate chain of command. It’s about removing confusion when every minute counts.
3. How do we communicate if our usual tools are down?
Email, phones, Teams. They all feel dependable right up until they’re not.
Quick gut check: If employees lost email access, would they know where to look for instructions? If your phone system failed, how would customers reach you? If your collaboration platform went dark, where does leadership post updates?
A backup communication plan doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to give employees and customers one dependable place to turn when the usual channels aren’t an option.
4. What’s our biggest operational dependency?
Some risks hide in plain sight because they never cause trouble…until they do.
It might be one software platform, your internet connection, a third-party provider, or the one employee who’s the only person who truly understands a critical process. During normal operations, none of that feels risky. But a single failure there can ripple across the whole business at once.
If you depend heavily on one system, one provider or one person, you need a clear picture of what happens when that dependency suddenly isn’t there. That’s how you decide where documentation, testing, backups or outside support matter most.
5. If a disruption hit tomorrow, what would we wish we’d done today?
This is the question that cuts through the assumptions, because it drops you right into the moment you’re trying to avoid.
Documented processes? Tested backups? Updated contact lists? Assigned responsibilities? An agreed order for bringing systems back online? None of it sounds dramatic on a normal week, which is exactly why it keeps getting pushed to next quarter.
Preparation gives you room to respond instead of react. The best recovery plans answer questions before anyone has to ask them.
Where ShowTech comes in
Once you’ve worked through these five questions, you’ll know which answers feel solid and which ones are held together with assumptions.
That’s our lane.
We help you identify operational risks, test recovery processes, verify backups, document key systems, and connect your technology planning to actual business goals. Not to make preparedness feel technical, but to make sure your systems, people and processes work together when pressure hits.
Put it on the calendar
Don’t wait on this one. Fifteen minutes. This week.
If your team can answer all five questions clearly, you’ve got a strong sense of how you’d hold up under pressure. If some answers feel shaky, good news: you just found the gaps while they were still cheap to fix.
Want a second set of eyes on your readiness? Schedule a discovery call with ShowTech. We’ll help you find the gaps, strengthen your preparedness strategy, and build a recovery plan before you need it.
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