Business Continuity Planning
Cyber-insurance underwriters and enterprise procurement teams now routinely require a written, tested business continuity plan before they'll bind a policy or sign a vendor — and the overwhelming majority of small businesses don't have one. This is a project-based consulting service that fills that specific, newly-mandatory gap rather than competing with expensive enterprise GRC consultancies.
A real, underexploited niche driven by an external regulatory-adjacent force (cyber-insurance underwriting) rather than by hope. Competition is thin because big BCP/GRC consultancies price for enterprise budgets and ignore the sub-$20M-revenue market. The ceiling per client is modest and the sales cycle runs through relationship-based referrals, which caps how fast one person can scale it — but a two-person shop with a referral network from brokers can run comfortably profitable.
The wedge is the insurance broker, not the business owner. Owners rarely wake up wanting a continuity plan; brokers and underwriters are the ones telling them they need one to get coverage, so brokers are highly motivated to have a vendor they can refer clients to when a renewal application gets kicked back for missing documentation. Building 3-5 referral relationships with commercial P&C or cyber-insurance brokers produces more qualified leads than any amount of cold outreach to business owners directly.
Demand tracks commercial insurance renewal cycles, which cluster around calendar-year-end and mid-year renewals; expect a slower stretch in mid-summer.
Suits you if
- ✓You have IT, insurance, compliance, or operations experience and can talk credibly about outages, backups, and incident response
- ✓You're comfortable with a consultative, interview-driven sales process rather than transactional selling
- ✓You can build and maintain referral relationships with insurance brokers or industry associations
- ✓You're patient with a multi-week sales cycle tied to insurance renewal timing
Skip it if
- ✕You need fast, transactional revenue rather than relationship-built pipeline
- ✕You're not willing to learn enough about a client's IT/ops stack to write a credible plan
- ✕You want to avoid all liability exposure — a plan that fails during a real incident can expose you to claims
- ✕You're in a market with an established, well-connected BCP/compliance consultant already serving brokers there
| Units | Revenue range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | $17,500–$27,500 | Part-time, side-project pace |
| 10 | $35,000–$55,000 | Solo full-time |
| 20 | $70,000–$110,000 | Solo plus subcontracted overflow support |
Skills: Structured interviewing to extract a business impact analysis from a non-technical owner; enough IT/ops literacy to spot real single points of failure (backups, one key employee, one supplier, one server); plain-English technical writing; and enough insurance-industry vocabulary to speak the underwriter's language when a client needs the plan to satisfy a specific questionnaire.
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