In this Sept. 15, 2017, photo, a house rests on the beachafter collapsing off a cliff from Hurricane Irma in Vilano Beach,Fla. The hurricanes that battered Texas and Florida likely spawnedthe worst disaster-created housing crunch since Hurricane Katrinaleft hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents without homesmore than a decade ago. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Given the back-to-back hurricanes hitting the United Stateslately, the number of business recovery plans activated recently hasmade it a busy time.

Many businesses in Texas, Florida and other places faced thechallenge of running their businesses while staring down anevacuation and dealing with other important matters, such asensuring the safety of family members and personal property.

Related: 5 steps to smarter catastrophepreparations

These events always test even the most detailed and robustbusiness recovery plan. For all of us, this is a reminder to reviewour business recovery plans. Here are several areas to bere-evaluated and considered anew:

1. Make sure you have a fluiddocument. Your firm's business recovery planshould be a living document and resource. Specifically, it requireson-going attention as your firm changes and adds new products,solutions and even environmental modifications.

In general, it's easy to incorporate significant product changesin your plan, such as a new reporting system, upgraded tradingtechnology and new servers. However, it is the systeminfrastructure and environmental changes that can — but shouldn't —be overlooked.

For example, if you decide to switch the primary Internetprovider for your office, how does this change impact your backupInternet provider solution? Sometimes it is these “minor”environmental changes that can end up causing the most havoc duringa business recovery event.

Because your business recovery plan is a living document, thesize and complexity of your firm should dictate who is responsiblefor updating and implementing the document. This task often fallsto the IT department.

But remember, every employee should have specific roles andresponsibilities. So, if you are the head trader at your firm, youshould own or at least be a co-owner of the plan for your area ofresponsibility. This could include the details and tasks for eachof your direct reports during a business recovery event.

Related: Is your business ready for a disaster? Here are 4ways to make sure

Be careful, though, since you don't want each department tobecome a “silo” for its specific area of the business recoveryplan. To avoid this situation, keep the plan glued together with aholistic view of the needs for your entire firm.

2. Plan for flexible timestoppages. Perhaps the greatest unknown during abusiness recovery event is how long is it going to last. Will thepower be out for an hour, a day, a week or even longer?

The same type of situation also can occur when one of yourtechnology partners is having frequent outages. You simply don'tknow when everything will be back to normal, and equallyfrustrating and challenging, you have no control of thetimeline.

So make sure your business recovery plan considers variouslengths of time periods for an outage/event. For example, whathappens if the power is out much longer than you anticipated? Whatdo you and your employees do?

There are many creative solutions, from using your car to poweryour devices to owning a backup generator, or even driving towhere power is available, if you can. The point here is that youneed to consider and discuss options so you and your employees arebest prepared.

3. Plan for multiple communicationchannels. A common challenge during a businessrecovery event is effectively communicating with colleagues andemployees. Sharing and receiving information is often one of thefirst tasks in the plan.

However, you can't rely on or expect that your regularcommunication channels will work. The size and scale of the eventmay be isolated to your firm or affect everyone in your region.

Given these variables, it's critical that your business recoveryplan includes multiple communication channels for your team toutilize, including emails, phones, texts and social-media channels.Everything should be considered and thoughtfully included in theplan. Also, remember in some events that your clients might bedirectly impacted as well, so consider what communication channelsyou may need for sharing information with them too.

Related: Keeping business running amidcatastrophe

4. Do the drill. There really is nobetter way to know if your business recovery plan is ready than torun a test drill on a regular basis. And make sure that you includemultiple variables and different team members in each drill. Then,have an open and candid debrief with your team on how it went — andjust as important — what changes should be made to the plan.

Dan Skiles ([email protected])is president of San Diego-based Shareholders Service Group, whichprovides dedicated services for independent registered investmentadvisors from its San Diego headquarters.