What Does a Business Continuity Consultant Do? Full Guide to BCP Consulting

If you’re searching for a business continuity consultant because you know your organisation needs to strengthen resilience—but you’re not entirely sure what a consultant actually does—this guide walks you through everything.

A business continuity consultant helps organisations understand their risks, plan for disruption and recover quickly when incidents occur. Whether hired on a project basis or a longer‑term engagement, they bring expertise, structure and clarity to your business continuity programme. If you want to see how a consultancy typically delivers, start with our overview of business continuity planning services and our business continuity process.

This article explains what they do, the value they add and what to expect when you bring one into your organisation.

For a related article which might be helpful, read: How to choose a Business Continuity consultant.

Why hire a business continuity consultant?

Bringing in an external continuity expert is often the fastest and most effective way to establish or mature a continuity programme. For a sense of how a programme is scoped and delivered at different maturity levels, see Inoni Essentials: best‑practice BCM. 

Key benefits include:

1. Experience across multiple organisations
   A good business continuity consultant has delivered continuity programmes for organisations similar in scale and complexity to yours. This means they understand common risks, pain points and sector‑specific challenges.

2. A clear, proven methodology
   Instead of starting from scratch, they use a tested process that takes you from risk understanding to a functioning business continuity plan—efficiently and without unnecessary pain. You can review a typical approach here: our business continuity process.

3. Independent authority
   When a consultant leads workshops and interviews, staff are more likely to participate and stay engaged. Having a neutral third party reduces internal politics and gets things done.

4. Access to best practice and real‑world knowledge
   Consultants bring insights from incidents, crisis events and exercises across multiple organisations. This strengthens your plan far beyond what most internal teams could build alone.

5. Becoming a trusted resilience adviser
   Over time, your consultant becomes a go‑to expert for resilience, crisis management, cyber response, supplier risk and more. If you need supporting technology to sustain the programme, consider using business continuity software alongside consulting.

Step 1: Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

The first major activity a business continuity consultant performs is the Business Impact Analysis. This establishes the foundation for your entire continuity programme and informs planning and exercising. For an example of a proven methodology, see our business continuity process. 

What the BIA achieves:

1. Define continuity risk
   Agree what impact means—financial loss, operational downtime, reputational damage, regulatory harm—and set thresholds for what becomes unacceptable.

2. Identify critical products, services or value streams
   These are the activities that must be recovered first during disruption.

3. Map dependencies
   Understand what each value stream relies on: systems, people, suppliers, facilities, data and equipment.

4. Identify continuity risks and scenarios
   Determine which scenarios could disrupt operations enough to breach thresholds. These become the focus of your business continuity plan.

Depending on the engagement, the consultant may produce a formal BIA report or use the findings directly to create your plan. Either way, they will need time and input from key staff across your organisation.

Step 2: Business continuity planning

Once the BIA is complete, your business continuity consultant moves into designing the continuity plan—or a full continuity framework. If you need a reference implementation, review our business continuity planning services. 

This includes:

1. Developing recovery strategies
   Practical steps and capabilities that allow your organisation to recover from the identified scenarios.

2. Incident response and crisis management structures
   Clear roles, responsibilities and escalation pathways for handling disruptions.

3. Crisis communications
   Internal and external communication approaches, including messaging templates and stakeholder considerations.

4. Operational recovery planning
   How the organisation will systematically return to normal operations.

Typical outputs include a complete Business Continuity Plan with incident response, crisis management and recovery components, scenario‑specific runbooks, IT disaster recovery plans and cyber incident response plans. 

Step 3: Ongoing business continuity management

A business continuity plan only works if it is maintained. This is where ongoing business continuity management comes in: training, exercising, maintenance, review and continual improvement. To support sustainability, many teams adopt a light management system and automation.

Ongoing activities include:

1. Maturity and compliance roadmaps
   Understand your current posture and define a realistic path to target maturity.

2. Training and awareness
   Make sure staff understand the plan and their responsibilities.

3. Exercising and testing
   Run realistic exercises to test your BCP against the scenarios identified in the BIA.

4. Maintenance and review
   Update the plan as risks change, systems are introduced and organisational structures evolve.

5. Broader organisational resilience
   Strengthen crisis management, incident response, cyber resilience, IT resilience, supplier resilience and people resilience.

Conclusion: Why a business continuity consultant is worth the investment

A skilled business continuity consultant brings structure, expertise and momentum to your resilience efforts. They help you understand your risks, define priorities, build workable plans and ensure your teams are ready to respond when disruption strikes. If you want to move beyond a compliance‑only approach and build real capability, explore our business continuity planning services and the supporting process. 

For a related article which might be helpful, read: How to choose a Business Continuity consultant.

If you’d like expert support from consultants who deliver BIA, BCP, exercising and resilience maturity work every day, explore our Business Continuity Planning Services or book a short consultation with our team.