Risk acknowledgement

How often do you consider the risk of running a business?

As much as we’d love business to be about profits and perhaps doing what we love, there are also risks to running a business and ignoring those risks can lead to all sorts of problems. Acknowledging risks, however may mean yu can reduce the likelihood of them occurring and allow you to plan ahead to make dealing with a risk easier.

Here are some risks you may want to look at for your business:

• investigate anyone you are doing large transactions with – you can do a credit check, check if they have civil claims against them, ask for bank references, and so on
• security offered by your web host
• insurance for physical issues (fire, flood, theft), professional indemnity, customer and staff safety, your income (income protection or salary continuance cover), delivery coverage, and so on
• losing information (computer problems, ‘the dog ate it’, misplacing a file or phone, etc)
• intellectual property (protect it with a trademark, limiting access to it and keeping records)
• fire, flood and other natural or man made disasters
• failure of suppliers to meet deadlines
• fraud
• human error (reduced by automating some tasks and having written procedures for others)
• being under resourced (eg key staff being sick, sudden influx of orders you can’t handle, insufficient cashflow to purchase raw materials)
• paying for marketing that provides little return or value

What other risks have you faced in your business? Were you able to plan ahead for them?