How To Prepare For The Biggest Risk To Your Business

Today I want to chat to you about building resilience into your business. I know that this is a topic that most of us would prefer not to think about because we have been trained to think about a crisis as a negative event. So before I dive in, I want to reframe that for you. A business crisis is actually a neutral event. Neither good nor bad. So here's an example. Somebody could hack your website and take it down. I could send you a million leads in the next five minutes to your website. And I would probably take your website down. The actual crisis is that your website went down. The reason it went down might be good or bad. And you may have some feelings about that, but actually, the crisis is that your website is done. That is not good or bad. It just is. It's a fact. So what makes it a good or bad outcome is actually your response to that event? So your website went down, did you curl up in a ball and rock backward and forwards in the corner crying? Or did you get on the phone with your web host and get it back up? what often happens is we are unprepared for the event. And so we don't respond fast enough or objectively enough. And the outcome for us is less than satisfactory. This then feeds our belief that a crisis is a bad thing and it makes it scary. And we don't want to think about it. And then the next one comes and the cycle repeats. So we stop that cycle today. As a business owner, you have really two big risks in your business. Number one is people and number two is tech. So from a people’s perspective, you are probably the biggest risk to your business. If your business couldn't carry on without you, you were unexpectedly unavailable, that's going to lead to a pretty bad outcome. Now, the reason you're unavailable could be that you're lying called up on your bathroom floor with the worst stomach bug you've ever had, or it could be that you came home and your partner kidnapped you off on a magical tropical vacation. The result is the same. You are unavailable for your business. The reason could be good or bad. The event itself as you are unavailable. Now, if you are listening to this smugly, smiling to yourself, that boom, well, I'm pretty sure my integrator or my OBM could just step in and run the show. Awesome. You are no longer your business's biggest risk they are, and they're probably an even bigger risk than you because they could also resign. So the reasons that they could be unavailable or greater than the reasons that you could be unavailable, but it's the same risk. Somebody who is key to your business is not available from a tech perspective, you have two components, the hardware, and the software. So the hardware is your physical laptop, your microphone. If you're a podcast or your camera, if you're a video person, some physical piece of tech breaks on you and is crucial to your business. The risk, in this case, is pretty low because we will normally be able to borrow another laptop. If we need to, we'll be able to, you know, , use our laptop camera instead of a fancy camera. If we really needed to. The risk in the tech space is much more in the software space. We all run our businesses on multiple different types of software and if this goes down very often, things can grind to a real, if we think about the two risks being people and our software, or what do we do. Well, from a people perspective, you really want to make sure that everything that anyone in your team does that is essential is documented. And you want to make sure that somebody else knows how to do it. So you've documented it and somebody else knows how to cover it. from a software perspective, think about how much time and money those companies are investing in making sure their software stays functional at all times and does what it says on the tin, right? That is their whole business. So you've been a bet that they have got huge crisis planning processes in place. If it does go down they're full. If it goes into getting it up and running as quickly as possible. So anything that you could do in this space is really going to be quite negligible. The only time I suggest that people get really into, okay, what could I use as a backup from a software perspective is if you have something time-sensitive, like a launch or an event, that's when you need to start thinking about, okay, what software is essential and what would the backup to that be? the most important part of all of this is to start doing this planning. Now, first of all, because you don't know when the next crisis is going to hit. And secondly, because right now you're probably pretty objective. You'll be able to think through a scenario without panic and emotion coming into color, your decisions. Remember resilience in business comes from preparation. A crisis is neither a good, nor a bad event. It's simply is what determines a good or bad outcome is how prepared you were and how you reflect. Yeah.