A practical blueprint for minimum operating capability and recovery readiness.
Minimum Viable Company
Minimum Viable Company (MVC) helps organisations define the minimum set of capabilities required to keep operating through disruption and to restore services in a controlled, validated way. It focuses on prioritising critical external facing services, internal processes and activities and foundational dependencies, to design recovery flows and processes in advance, rather than improvising during a disruption. The outcome is clearer guardrails, stronger readiness to mobilise recovery, and greater confidence that recovery is achievable within outage tolerances.
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Define the Minimum Viable Company
Leadership agrees what viability means for the organisation, against the threats that matter most. This starts with prioritising what must remain available, rather than treating everything as critical. The output is a time-sequenced view of the critical services, customer commitments, internal processes, dependencies, regulatory obligations, impact tolerances, and recovery priorities that define the organisation’s MVC.
Design solutions for delivery of the MVC
Resilient solutions are matched to the dependencies that support the MVC. This includes leveraging existing capabilities across business continuity, disaster recovery, cyber, supply chain, physical security, and operational resilience. The right answer may range from a manual workaround, to substitution, to an alternative supplier, to a technology life raft that can be invoked when the primary environment cannot be trusted. Design choices should align business, technology, data, third-party, and operational requirements. Different parts of the business may need different solutions, including a Minimum Viable Factory for asset-heavy operations, or a Minimum Viable Business for distinct lines of service.
Deploy and test solutions
Solutions are validated against severe but plausible scenarios. Plans that have not been tested are not plans. Effective testing validates dependencies across people, systems, data, sites, and third parties, while rehearsing decision-making with the executive team in the room. It should also build confidence with critical suppliers and partners, refine playbooks and recovery sequencing, and allow key teams to understand their roles in invoking and operating the MVC.
Drive, monitor, and improve the MVC
MVC is embedded into governance, ownership, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Periodic scenario testing, executive oversight, and regular updates allow the MVC to evolve with the business, its risk profile, and its operating model. Key Resilience Indicators give the board a clear view of whether the MVC remains current, tested, understood, and capable of operating within agreed tolerances and risk appetites.
“Defining what truly must be protected to minimise harm to external stakeholders, maintain financial stability, and preserve stakeholder trust should be one of the C-suite's highest priorities right now”.
The Survival Core: Your Minimum Viable Company for Enterprise Resilience
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Global leader for crisis and resilience
PwC’s Global Centre for Crisis and Resilience is a global network of 1,400+ crisis and resilience professionals across 80+ countries. We’ve helped thousands of organisations globally as their trusted business advisor before, during and after crisis: from building robust enterprise resilience capabilities to strategically navigating disruption as it happens. We convene the right specialists across the globe in times of crisis within a matter of hours, helping organisations prepare for and recover from business disruption—and build resilience for what’s next.
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