The Business Continuity Plan Template Every Multi-Location Operator Needs Before Winter

A fill-in plan for keeping every location safe, staffed and reachable through storms, outages and frozen pipes, and for deciding who closes a site and how it reopens.

It’s 4:50 a.m. A winter storm warning went up overnight. Three location managers are texting about whether to open. One site has no power. A district manager is awake and replying, but nobody is sure who makes the call, and the opening crew at two locations is already on the road.

A business continuity plan settles that before the storm. It’s how your business keeps its critical work going, or gets it back quickly, when something interrupts it. Ready.gov’s business planning guidance builds one from a business impact analysis, recovery strategies, a written plan, and regular testing.

With more than one location, the plan has two extra jobs. It has to work at the site with your newest manager, and someone above the sites has to be able to see all of them at once.

The short answer

A business continuity plan template for a multi-location business covers eight sections: risk assessment, critical functions and recovery targets, decision authority, a communication tree, staffing backups, vendor and facility contingencies, closure triggers, and reopening. It is filled in once at the brand level, with a one-page sheet for each location.

Key takeaways

• Build two layers: one brand plan for shared decisions, and one sheet per location for local contacts and risks.

• Name a primary and a backup for every decision, especially who can close a site and who can reopen it.

• Tie closures to triggers anyone can check, such as a National Weather Service warning for the county.

• Check whether your backups share the same power grid, roads or vendor. In a regional storm, they often do.

• Run a 30-minute tabletop exercise in November, turn every gap into an owned fix, and review the plan each October.

Download the business continuity plan template (PDF), no form required. The full template is also below.

How to use this template across locations

Build the plan in two layers.

The brand plan. Written once. It sets who decides, the closing thresholds, the communication tree and the reopening steps. Every location follows it.

The location sheet. One page per site: address, manager and backups, where the utility shutoffs are, local vendor contacts, and what tends to freeze first. The location manager fills it in and keeps it current.

Name one plan owner at HQ and one owner at each location, each with a backup. Review the plan every fall before the first freeze.

Store it somewhere every manager can open from a phone during an outage, and keep a printed copy at each site. Ready.gov’s sample business continuity plan keeps print and electronic copies in more than one place for the same reason. Leave passwords and alarm codes out of the shared copy.

The business continuity plan template

Section 1: Risk assessment

List the hazards that could interrupt a location, then rate each location separately. A site with a flat roof and pipes on an exterior wall carries different risks from one inside a strip mall.

Key your decisions to National Weather Service alerts, since everyone can check them. At the Baltimore/Washington office, for example, a Winter Storm Watch means significant, hazardous winter weather is possible within 48 hours. A Winter Storm Warning means it’s occurring or imminent. A Winter Weather Advisory covers lighter snow, or any freezing rain, expected to cause significant inconvenience. The exact criteria vary by local forecast office, so check yours on weather.gov.

Ready.gov’s risk assessment table is a good model if you want more columns.

Section 2: Critical functions and recovery targets

List what has to keep working, who owns it, and how long it can be down. This is a short business impact analysis. Ready.gov has a full worksheet if you want to go deeper.

Two numbers go in each row. Maximum tolerable downtime is the point where an outage starts doing real harm. The recovery time objective (RTO) is how fast you plan to have the function back, so it should be shorter.

Put a dollar figure on the big ones. Take a spa with eight treatment rooms, six appointment slots per room on a Saturday, and 80% booked. That’s 38 appointments. At an average ticket of $120 (an illustration, not a benchmark), a full day without power costs about $4,560 in services, before any rebooking. That figure tells you what a generator contract or a backup booking process is worth.

Then check the workaround against a regional storm. A sister location ten miles away is a good fallback for a broken furnace, and a poor one if both sites share the same power grid, roads and snow contractor.

Section 3: Decision authority

Most storm-morning confusion comes from one question: who decides? Fill in a primary and a backup for each call, and say what happens if neither answers.

Write one more line above the table: if anyone is in immediate danger, the manager on site acts first and reports after. Safety calls never wait for a sign-off.

Section 4: Communication tree

Write down who tells whom, and by when. The time targets matter as much as the names.

Keep the message itself simple: what’s happening, what each person should do, and when the next update comes. A fill-in version:

“[Location] will [close / open late at TIME] today because of [reason]. Team members on the schedule: [instruction]. Customers with bookings: [option]. Next update at [time] by [channel].”

Use one source of truth so two managers aren’t sending different answers. Ready.gov’s power outage guidance also says to keep a paper copy of your communications plan, because phones die too.

Plan for the frontline gap. Many hourly team members don’t have a company email address, so the tree has to reach their phones.

Section 5: Staffing backups

A storm makes a thin roster thinner. In Franchise Business Review’s 2026 Franchising at Work Report, a survey of more than 9,500 franchise employees, staffing and workload sustainability came up as the year’s biggest new concern, concentrated at the unit level.

Write the travel rule down. If the county is under a warning, people shouldn’t feel they have to drive into it to keep their job. And don’t assume the backup manager can get in just because the primary can’t. They may live on the same roads.

Cover safety for the people who do come in. OSHA’s winter weather guidance tells employers to train workers on cold stress and slippery surfaces, provide warm areas for breaks, and keep a reliable way to reach workers so you can stop work if a storm requires it. Clear and treat walkways, entrances and parking before staff and customers arrive.

Section 6: Vendor and facility contingencies

Fill in one table per location. Note whose contract includes priority response in winter, since that’s who gets there first after a storm.

The “last verified” column is the one that saves you. A number that was right last winter may ring a disconnected line this one. Call each vendor in October, confirm they still cover the site, and write the date.

Before the first freeze, service the heating, insulate exposed pipes, find the water shutoff, test emergency lighting, check the roof and gutters, and confirm the snow contract. Our facility maintenance checklist has the full list.

For frozen pipes, the American Red Cross advises leaving the heat on at no lower than 55°F when a building will be empty in cold weather, opening cabinet doors so warm air reaches pipes, and letting cold water drip from faucets on exposed pipes when it’s very cold. Its guidance is written for homes, so treat it as a starting point for a location that sits empty overnight.

For power loss, Ready.gov’s power outage sheet says to run generators outdoors only, at least 20 feet from windows, doors and garages, and to throw out refrigerated food that has been at 40°F or higher for more than 4 hours. A coffee shop’s walk-in cooler needs a thermometer and a person who checks it.

Section 7: Closure triggers

Decide the thresholds in October, so nobody is inventing them at 5 a.m. Section 3 says who decides. This section says when.

Then the closure checklist: signage on the door. Online hours updated. Bookings, members and customers told. Freeze protection on and heat set. Water off where your plan says so. Alarm set and doors locked.

Many car wash operators close below a set temperature. Writing that number into the plan means managers don’t debate it every cold morning. A gym with a frozen pipe in the locker room may only need to close that area, which is why the partial-closure option belongs in the plan.

Section 8: Reopening

Walk the site before staff arrive. Then work through this list:

• Check for leaks, ice and roof damage.

• Test equipment, refrigeration and the alarm.

• Clear walkways, entrances and parking.

• Confirm the crew for the reopening shift.

• Get the reopen approved by the person named in Section 3.

• Tell customers and members you’re open.

• Log any damage, with photos.

Anything found on the walk should become a work order with an owner and a due date, so the damage list doesn’t live in a text thread. Keep the item open until someone confirms the work is done, even after the repair request goes in. If repairs stack up after a rough week, see our post on clearing a maintenance backlog.

How to test your business continuity plan

A plan nobody has tried will break at the first step. Run a 30-minute tabletop exercise in November, with operations, HR and whoever handles facilities in the room.

1. Pick a regional scenario. An ice storm warning for half your locations, issued at 9 p.m. on a Thursday, with power out at two sites by morning.

2. Remove one backup. Tell the group the district manager is unreachable, or that the sister location you planned to send staff to has lost heat too.

3. Walk the plan. Who decides? What message goes out, and when? Send a real test message and time how long it takes every location to confirm.

4. Write down every gap. Let people answer the way they really would. The gaps are what you’re looking for.

Turn each gap into a fix with an owner, a date and a way to prove it’s done.

Then retest the part that failed.

Keep the plan current

Put two dates on the calendar: a full review every October, and a review within a week of any closure. Between those, update the plan whenever a manager, a vendor or a location changes.

When the plan owner changes, hand it over on purpose. The new owner should call the contacts, read the open fixes, and find the printed copies. Ready.gov’s sample plan treats training, testing and regular maintenance as part of the plan itself, and this is where that happens.

Where Woven fits

The plan is a document. Running it across many locations on a storm morning is where one system helps.

Keep the plan where managers can find it. Store the brand plan and location sheets in the Knowledge Center’s File Library. If you publish the plan as a policy, team members can acknowledge it.

Send the call. A Woven Communication can go to specific positions or teams, and teams can fill themselves automatically by location and position, so “everyone at the four Northeast locations” is one audience. You can require an acknowledgement, send a reminder only to people who haven’t read it, translate the message, and see in Insights who opened it. Team chat handles the back-and-forth.

Cover the gaps. When someone can’t make it in, they call in from the app and the shift can turn into an open shift, with alerts to eligible coworkers. Team Member Finder looks people up by skill, location or position when you need to borrow someone.

Run the checklists. A task template can be sent manually to every affected location at once, with photo or signature proof on the steps that matter: heat set, water off, doors locked.

Reopen to standard. Build your Section 8 reopening walk as a Location Audit template: leaks, ice, roof, equipment, alarm, walkways. The manager works through it on a phone with photos, gets a scored report, and turns any failed item into a work order or action plan on the spot. Regional leaders can see which reopened sites passed and which still have open items.

Get the right vendor moving. Each location’s Who to Contact list holds typed contacts such as HVAC, plumbing, general contractor, internet and phone. Vendor records show whether insurance and contracts are current. A Critical work order carries its own target resolution time. Our guide to the best work order software for multi-location operations covers what to look for.

For car washes. Wash Down records a weather closure with the weather captured automatically, and separate causes for snow and ice, a site closed for plowing, equipment frozen, and an operations decision to close. After the season, you can see what each cold snap cost.

Put it together and the 4:50 a.m. storm morning plays out differently. The plan has already settled who decides, when to close, who covers and who to call. Woven carries that plan to every location at once: the call reaches the right managers and team members, open shifts fill, the closure and reopening checklists run with proof, and every repair has an owner and a due date. Every site gets the same answer at the same time, and nobody is guessing from a text thread.

Keep a printed copy for the morning the power and the internet are both out. For every other morning, one system runs the plan. Write it before the first freeze, then let Woven put it in the hands of every location.

Business continuity plan FAQ

What should a business continuity plan template include?

For a multi-location business: a risk assessment, critical functions with recovery targets and workarounds, decision authority with backups, a communication tree, staffing backups, vendor and facility contingencies, closure triggers, and reopening steps. Add a one-page sheet for each location with its contacts and site details.

How do you make a business continuity plan for multiple locations?

Write one brand-level plan that sets who decides, the closing thresholds and the communication tree. Then have each location fill in a one-page sheet with its address, backups, shutoffs and vendors. Name an owner at HQ and at every location, each with a backup.

What is the difference between a business continuity plan and an emergency plan?

An emergency plan covers keeping people safe during the event: evacuation, shelter, first aid. A business continuity plan covers keeping the business running, or restoring it, during and after. Most operators need both, and each should point to the other.

What is a recovery time objective?

A recovery time objective (RTO) is how quickly you plan to restore a function after it stops. It sits inside the maximum tolerable downtime, which is how long the function can be down before the outage does real harm.

Who should own a business continuity plan?

One operations leader at HQ owns the brand plan, and each location manager owns their location sheet. Both need a named backup. HR, facilities and IT should review the sections that touch their work.

When should a business close for winter weather?

When staff or customers can’t get there or be there safely, or when the site loses power, heat or water. Tie the decision to clear triggers, such as an NWS Winter Storm Warning for the county, and set them before the season starts.

How often should a business continuity plan be tested?

At least once a year, with a short tabletop exercise before winter, and again after any real closure. Update contacts whenever a manager or vendor changes.

Can software replace a business continuity plan?

No. Software can send the messages, run the checklists and track the repairs, but the plan decides who acts, when and in what order. Keep a printed copy for when power or internet is down.

Download the business continuity plan template as a printable PDF and fill in one location sheet per site before the first freeze. Want to run it across every location? Book a demo.