How to Build a Hurricane Business Continuity Plan (2026 Template)

A hurricane business continuity plan answers one question: how does the business keep serving customers when the office is dark, flooded, or unreachable? It has seven parts — critical functions, people, communication, technology, recovery targets, vendors, and testing. A hurricane preparedness checklist gets you through the storm itself; the continuity plan is what gets you through the two weeks after. Here’s a template you can fill out in an afternoon.

⚠️ IMAGE PLACEHOLDER — business continuity plan binder open to a hurricane response section on a conference table | Alt: “business continuity plan binder open to a hurricane response section on a conference table”

Part 1: List your critical business functions

Write down the five to ten things your business must keep doing to survive: taking orders, answering the phone, billing, payroll, patient scheduling — whatever applies. For each, note how long you could stop doing it before the damage becomes serious. This list drives every other decision in the plan; everything else exists to keep these functions running.

Part 2: People and roles

• Name a decision-maker (and a backup) for closing, evacuating, and reopening.
• Assign each critical function a primary and backup owner — people evacuate, lose power, and have their own family emergencies.
• Keep an employee roster with personal cells and out-of-area contacts, printed and stored off-site.

Part 3: Communication plan

Decide in advance how you’ll reach employees (group text, phone tree, WhatsApp group), what customers will hear (voicemail update, website banner, social post), and who speaks for the business. Forward business phone lines to cell phones or a VoIP mobile app before the storm — a customer who reaches a helpful human during a hurricane remembers it.

Part 4: Technology and data

Document every system your critical functions depend on: what it runs on, how it’s backed up, and how staff reach it remotely. Our overview of disaster recovery services covers the technology options in more depth, and data backup & recovery is the foundation everything else in this section depends on.

Part 5: Set your RTO and RPO

For each critical function, set two numbers: RTO (recovery time objective) — how quickly it must be running again — and RPO (recovery point objective) — how much data you can afford to lose. “Email back in 4 hours, losing at most 1 hour of mail” is a plan. “Get everything back as fast as possible” is not. These numbers tell you (or your IT provider) exactly what backup and failover technology is justified.

Part 6: Vendors, suppliers, and documents

• List critical vendors with account numbers and emergency support lines: internet, phones, payroll, key suppliers, insurance agent, bank.
• Store copies of insurance policies, leases, licenses, and the plan itself in the cloud and printed off-site.
• Ask your key suppliers what their hurricane plan is — your continuity depends on theirs.

Part 7: Test it before August

Run a tabletop exercise once a year, before the season peaks: gather the team, pick a scenario (“Category 3 landfall Tuesday, office flooded, power out for six days”), and walk through the plan hour by hour. Every plan we’ve ever tested surfaced at least one surprise — a forwarding number that didn’t work, a backup owner who’d left the company, a “cloud” system that actually lived under someone’s desk. Finding those in a conference room costs nothing. A vCIO can run this exercise with you and translate the results into a technology budget.