What are good tips for starting a business continuity plan?

My advice for you : scope scope and scope , this is exactly what turns any BCP into a nightmare , usually senior management will tell you we need everything and will pay for nothing , so your only resort is to convince them with a methodology for prioritizing BCP scope based on business priorities you can become very creative doing one on your own or follow the risk based approach by doing a risk assessment in parallel to define your priorities ,

A good tip for starting a BCP is start with the most critical services that are impacting organization operations. To start this, you'll need to do a risk assessment business impact analysis BIA, to identify and list business services in terms of (revenue impact/ brand/ market share impact/ reputation ...etc). another good tip, is having a BC committee (also acting as crisis committee), which should include top management and decision makers. Finally you should cover in your scop, both services recovery as well as facilityies and staff requied to carry out services operations.

One important attribute to be defined for any recovery plan, your RTO (recovery time objective) & RPO (recovery point objective)

finally, having BCP in place, your challenge to maintain these BCP plans, is to have regular testing and continual improvment for these plans to enhance your planned RTO/RPO