When "It Won't Happen to Us" Becomes a Costly Mistake

Every successful business believes it's invincible, until it isn't. Somewhere right now, a profitable company is making a fatal assumption: that disaster only happens to someone else. By this time next year, some of those companies won't exist.

Business Continuity Planning

The Story of TechStart Solutions

TechStart Solutions was a thriving software development firm with 150 employees and strong corporate clients. When Sarah Chen joined as CFO in 2018, she proposed developing a comprehensive business continuity plan.

The CEO's response? "We're a software company. We're in the cloud. What could possibly happen that would shut us down?"

The VP of Operations agreed. "We've been fine for eight years. That budget could go toward another developer or marketing campaign, things that actually generate revenue."

Sarah pushed back with statistics and a modest proposal: comprehensive data backups in multiple locations, documented recovery procedures, and alternative communication systems.

Marcus, the CEO, was unmoved. "You're being paranoid. We have backups. Our hosting provider handles that. Besides, if something happened, we'd figure it out. We're smart people."

Then came the ransomware attack.

On a Tuesday morning in June 2019, employees arrived to find their systems locked. A ransom demand: R 950,000 in cryptocurrency within 72 hours. The attack had quietly spread for three days, encrypting backup systems before deploying the visible demand.

The cloud backups they relied on. Encrypted too.

What followed was chaos. No incident response plan meant hours wasted debating next steps. No documented systems list meant IT staff scrambled to determine what could be recovered. No crisis communication plan meant clients learned about the attack through rumours instead of official channels.

Recovery took eleven weeks. Three major clients terminated contracts during the outage. Several more left afterward, citing security concerns. The company spent R 380,000 on emergency consultants, faced regulatory fines, and settled two client lawsuits.

Total cost: R 4.2 million in direct costs and lost revenue.

The business continuity plan Sarah had proposed eighteen months earlier would have cost R 175,000 to develop and implement.

Business Resistance

Why Companies Resist Planning

Several factors contribute to this dangerous mindset:

Optimism bias makes leaders believe they're less likely to experience disasters than others. Every failed business once believed they were special.

Recency bias means that without recent examples, threats feel abstract and distant.

Opportunity cost thinking frames continuity planning as money that could fuel growth instead, ignoring that disaster costs almost always dwarf preventive investment.

Most dangerously, many leaders believe intelligence and adaptability are sufficient, that they'll "figure it out" when disaster strikes. But chaos, stress, and time pressure make clear thinking nearly impossible. The time to plan is before the crisis, not during it.

The Reality

Studies show that 40% of businesses experiencing a major disaster without adequate planning never reopen. Another 25% fail within a year.

Recovery time is everything. Companies that resume operations quickly maintain customer confidence and minimize losses. Those that cannot often never recover, regardless of previous success.

What You Need

An effective business continuity plan includes:

• Risk assessment for threats specific to your business

• Recovery strategies for different disaster scenarios

• Clear responsibilities assigned to specific team members

• Crisis communication protocols

• Data backups in multiple geographic locations with regular testing

• Documentation of critical processes and contacts

Plans must be tested regularly. Tabletop exercises reveal gaps before they become critical failures.

Start Now

If your organization lacks a business continuity plan, the most dangerous thing you can do is assume you don't need one.

Begin by identifying your most critical business functions. Assess what would happen if they became unavailable for a day, a week, or a month. Don't forget to include third-party vendors, suppliers, and service providers in your plan, as their failures can disrupt your operations just as severely as your own. Even basic measures like cloud backups in multiple locations, documented processes, alternative supplier contacts, and an emergency communication tree provide significantly more protection than nothing.

Business continuity planning isn't paranoia or wasteful overhead. It's a fundamental responsibility of leadership, as essential as financial planning or legal compliance.

Don't let pride or optimism bias turn your success story into a cautionary tale. The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in business continuity planning. It's whether you can afford not to.

The companies and scenarios are provided as examples to support learning. The insights and statistics are grounded in real-world business continuity challenges faced by organizations across industries.