All business owners run the risk of receiving that one phone call that could place their business in serious jeopardy. We know that risk management is something we should all take seriously, but at the same time we often never get around to doing so.
As with many areas in our companies, we often have too many “action” choices. Instead of taking all of the actions we should, many times we are overwhelmed by the choices we could make and decide to do nothing.
If you decide that controlling business risk is important enough for you to take action on, we will first help you to decide which specific risks you believe are most likely to occur. Those are the risks we will concentrate on.
Risk management— and all other strategies we help our Clients with— are about making your life better. It makes no sense to concentrate on a risk that is not likely to happen, there by wasting strategic energy on this activity.
Often, managing and controlling your business risk involves insurance solutions. Whether the risks are employees leaving the firm, disability, theft or property damage, insurance solutions are available that may help solve your problems.
Insurance is often a complicated product that many business owners like yourself truly dislike and, as a result, don’t spend a lot of time dealing with it. We help you determine when insurance might be the proper solution and explain the various methods of structuring your insurance as an integrated business risk management tool.
Some of the strategic activities that are integral to controlling your business risk are:
- Doing a review of your major business risks
- Analyzing a way of moving personal risk into a business risk.
- Understanding your corporate structure from a risk management point of view.
- Listing the five most likely risks that could put you out of business followed by building plans around managing those risks.
- Helping you build a risk management team so you know who to call if you receive that unwanted “phone call.”
- Analyzing risk within your company and helping you decide which should be retained and which should be insured.
- Analyzing what would be the consequences if you were not able to work for a significant time period.
Very few business owners enjoy working on controlling business risk. Those who do will often find that one of the high risks they’ve worried about will happen. If, and when, that risk appears, having a plan in place is often the difference between whether or not the company will thrive.