The 15-Minute Meeting Every Leadership Team Should Have
Most Houston businesses have a disaster plan somewhere. Fewer can say where it is, and fewer still have read it since it was written. Here is a faster test of your readiness: put your leadership team in a room for 15 minutes and ask five questions. If the room goes quiet on any of them, you have found a gap worth fixing before a hurricane, a ransomware note, or a burst pipe finds it for you.
No slides, no consultants, no prep. Just five questions and honest answers.
Question 1: If we stopped operating tomorrow, what comes back first?
Not everything can be restored at once, and pretending otherwise is how recoveries stall. Is it email? The phone system? Your line-of-business application? The answer differs for a law office and a machine shop, and your backup and disaster recovery plan should restore things in the order your revenue actually depends on, not the order the server rack happens to load.
Question 2: Who decides during a disruption?
When systems are down, someone has to call the shot: do we fail over, do we pay for emergency hardware, do we notify customers? If the answer is “whoever picks up the phone first,” decisions get made twice or not at all. Name the person, name the backup person, and write both down.
Question 3: How do we communicate if our normal tools are down?
If Microsoft 365 is unreachable, the outage announcement cannot live in Microsoft 365. Where is the out-of-band contact list — cell numbers, personal emails — and when was it last updated? A stale phone tree fails exactly when you need it.
Question 4: What is our single biggest dependency?
Every business has one: a piece of software, a server in a closet, an internet connection, sometimes a single person who knows how everything fits together. Naming your biggest single point of failure is uncomfortable, which is why most teams never do it. It is also the highest-value fifteen seconds of this meeting.
Question 5: If it happened tomorrow, what would we wish we had done today?
This question converts vague worry into a to-do list. Test the backups. Update the contact sheet. Document the one process that lives in one person’s head. Whatever surfaces here is your action list, and it usually costs far less to do now than to regret later.
Where your IT partner fits
An experienced IT provider has watched these five questions get answered well and badly across hundreds of businesses. We help Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth companies turn the quiet moments in this meeting into tested recovery plans — layered security, verified backups, and documentation that holds up under pressure, not just in a binder.
Put it on the calendar
Fifteen minutes, five questions, once a quarter. If this quarter’s meeting surfaces gaps you want a second opinion on, we will walk through them with you.