What does one day of down time actually cost your firm?

You’re on a client video call when the lights in your office go out. Your screen stays on. Your phone keeps working. The client on the other end notices nothing, except for the comment you make about the building losing power.  

Two minutes later, the lights come back. Nobody on your team had to do anything. Nobody had to call you about it.

 That’s what business continuity actually looks like. And it is rarer than you might think.

The comforting lie about downtime.

How long could your firm actually go without its main technology systems? Without computers, voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones, video conferencing, printers and in-house servers?

If your first estimate is a week, maybe more, you are not alone.

That’s what most people think… before they lose power. Then you have an outage that lasts just half a day and all chaos breaks out.

Your phones don’t ring. The case management and line of business software your team uses to run their day is unreachable. Email is queued onsome unreachable cloud server somewhere.

By lunchtime, your “how long can we last” estimate shrinks to a day. Maybe less. Definitely less.

Here is the math your firm rarely does (until it has to).

At $10 million in revenue you’re burning through roughly $5,000 every hour your systems are down. A $20 million practice is closer to $10,000 per hour and so on. Those are not abstract numbers.

·      You are still paying your staff.

·      You are still on the hook for your lease.

·      And every client who calls and cannot get through is making a quiet mental note.

Your firm’s burn rate is running whether you are watching it or not.

Most outages are not dramatic.

The thing that takes your firm down is rarely the big cyberattack you read about in the news. It can be a cyberattack, don’t get complacent, but it’s more likely something smaller. Like a single internet connection going dead from a bad router connection. A server quietly failing in the closet. A line of business software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor updating your software at the worst possible moment. Boring failures are the real cause of most “lost hours” in professional services. They are also the ones that get treated as somebody else’s problem until they’re not.

What real business continuity looks like.

Real business continuity is built one redundancy at a time, at the points in your infrastructure that actually matter. Two internet connections, from different carriers, with automatic failover. A VoIP phone system that doesn’t depend on your office staying powered. Backup systems that activate seamlessly, so the call to your team is, “Did you know we just had an issue?” instead of, “Everything is down.”

Your goal state is an invisible technology foundation. Your doors stay open. Your email and phones stay on. Your team stays productive.Your clients never knew there was a problem at all.

Growth creates its own failure points.

Adding head count. Opening a second location. Deploying new software your team will quickly depend on. Each additional element represents a potential single point of failure in your systems. The bigger your firm gets, the more your continuity needs to be designed forward, not patched together after the fact.

One last question worth asking yourself.

If your firm went dark for the next four hours, who at your firm could tell you, without checking, exactly what would still work and what would not?

If the answer is nobody, that is the real signal. Not the outage itself.

Cypress Grove Technologies is the Strategic Growth Infrastructure and Risk Mitigation Partner for professional services firms in New York. If you would like to know what your firm’s burn rate actually is, we are happy to walk through it with you.

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