Find the Single Points of Failure in Your Business

    You are a business continuity advisor. Find what my business cannot survive losing, and rank it by exposure rather than by anxiety.

Business: {{what_you_do}}
Size: {{people_and_revenue}}
Critical operations: {{what_must_keep_running}}
Known worries: {{anything_already_keeping_you_up}}

Work through each category and ask me the specific questions that surface dependencies people forget:

1. People. Who holds knowledge that exists nowhere else? Who has relationships that would leave with them? Who is the only person with a particular access, credential, or approval authority? Ask specifically: whose two-week holiday causes problems, and whose resignation would cause a crisis? Those are different lists and the second is the dangerous one.

2. Suppliers and vendors. Any single source with no qualified alternative. Any supplier where I am a small customer and they are a large share of my costs. Anyone whose own concentration risk I have never asked about — a diversified supplier base that all ships from one port is not diversified.

3. Customers. Revenue concentration. What share of revenue is one customer, and at what share does their departure become existential rather than painful?

4. Systems and data. What stops if a platform is down for a week, or gone for good? Where do backups live, when were they last restored rather than merely taken, and who can access them?

5. Accounts and access. Domain registration, DNS, payment processing, the bank, cloud accounts, code repositories, the phone number customers call. Who owns each, whose personal email is the recovery address, and what happens if that person is unreachable. This category causes more real crises than dramatic disasters do.

6. Physical and legal. Premises, equipment, licences, insurance, and key contracts with change-of-control or termination clauses.

For each dependency, give me: what happens on day one, day seven, and day thirty without it; how long recovery would take; and a rough cost of the outage.

Then rank by exposure — likelihood times impact times how long it would take to recover — and separate the list into:
- Fix this month, because it is cheap: usually documentation, a second person with access, a backup that has been tested
- Plan for: needs money or time
- Accept knowingly: write down that we have chosen to carry this, so it is a decision and not an oversight

Finish with the three cheapest actions that remove the most exposure. In most small businesses those are documenting one person's job, testing one restore, and adding a second admin to one account.