The Resilience Advantage: Build Your Small Business Resilience Plan in 5 Steps

Developed by Climate Resilience Consulting, “The Resilience Advantage” is a web-based guide designed to help small businesses understand their disaster-related risks and better prepare for disaster events to ensure resilience and business continuity. The guide presents five key steps and provides free checklists, self-assessments, and toolkits for small businesses to develop a resilience plan. 

Disaster events are already affecting the 34 million small businesses in the U.S. every year. As noted on the website, in a 2025 Bloomberg survey, more than half of businesses reported weather-related financial losses the prior year. According to FEMA, forty percent of small businesses never reopen following a disaster event. 

The guide outlines five steps towards small business resilience:

  • Step 1: Know Your Risks – The guide recommends using tools like FEMA’s National Risk Index, the NOAA Climate Explorer, Realtor.com’s “Environmental Risks” tool, or local hazard mitigation plans for a business’s city or county to help understand the types of natural disasters most likely to affect the area. It provides a Hazard Assessment tool for download and recommends assigning a level of risk for each hazard identified.
  • Step 2: Protect Your People – The guide notes the importance of preparing staff for a disaster event. It provides a Resilient People Checklist and also recommends training staff on emergency procedures and walking through the workplace to identify needs (e.g., evacuation, shelter, communication) in the event of a disaster.
  • Step 3: Protect Your Property & Operations – Noting the importance of preserving business assets for staying afloat after disaster, the guide provides a Resilient Property Checklist to assist with preparing a business’s physical space and digital records from disaster-related risks. It also recommends identifying equipment in the workplace that could be damaged, and making sure that team members know where critical systems are and how to access backups.
  • Step 4: Protect Your Profit – The guide recommends reviewing financial records to estimate reserves needed in the event of a disaster, completing a Resilient Profit Checklist to improve financial preparedness for downtime, relocation, or emergency repairs, and talking to insurance agents and bankers to understand coverage and funding options.
  • Step 5: Communication & Continuity – Noting the importance of clear communication during and after a disaster event, the guide recommends creating a plan for sharing updates internally, using the Resilient Communications Template to list contact information, messaging templates, and backup locations, and assigning roles for updating customers and vendors and coordinating internally.

For more information and detailed guidance, the website also provides links to a “Small Biz Resilience Advantage” limited-series podcast and a book for purchase entitled The Resilience Advantage: A Small Business Guide to Preparing for Floods, Heatwaves, and Other Climate Disasters.

Publication Date: September 2, 2025

Author or Affiliated User:

Sectors:

Resource Category:

Resource Types:

  • Planning guides
  • Websites

Impacts:

Go To Resource