My passion has always been analysing what makes companies successful and why competitors in the same marketspace fail. I won’t go right back to the 1970s when insurance companies were using risk as a calculator to assess potential claims, but I will start at the point in time when I started to notice significant change in the adoption of risk management for day-to-day business activity. In the early 2000s a quality manager was mainly responsible for compliance and certification until risk started to appear in certification documents like ISO 9001 as a process that required management activity to provide evidence controls were in place.
Risk Registers were used as a control mechanism for capturing and controlling business risk and this activity was generally handled by the Quality Manager at the time. Fast forward twenty years and risk management has become one of the most important roles within the org structure of a business. Software developers have capitalised on this growing trend by introducing risk management software that allows SMEs to quantitatively account for risk in forecasting and decision making, for example a Monte Carlo simulation would be used to handle an extensive range of problems in a variety of different fields to understand the impact of risk and uncertainty.
Now on the spectrum there is also enterprise risk management where risks are placed in the centralised hub of the business to seize opportunities related to the achievement of their strategic objectives, or through opportunities that gain a competitive advantage. In a nutshell managing risk equates to improved business excellence, higher turnover, and increased profits.
Risk is underrated when it comes to the long-term stability and growth of a business due to the function of having a top down visual of the business outputs and being able to analyse how far its off track from achieving its annual objectives.
Making a Difference
I have twenty plus years of business knowledge and every time I have been involved with a failing operation or loss-making project, I analyse the information flow with the points below, identifying key areas of business failure.
- Poor cashflow management
- Lack of financial control
- Poor planning and lack of strategy
- Weak leadership and lack of employee engagement
- Not understanding the macro picture with regards to competitor analysis
These are all top business risks that require a high-level mitigation plan with a strategy for continual improvement. Methodical and strategic planning, underpinned by extensive research, will enable you to determine, analyse, and monitor the viability and functioning of your business and the market in which it operates. As a result, your business is less likely to fail. You will have a far greater awareness of what is going on, which will enable you to respond quickly when existing or potential problems are identified.
The worst time to be in business
This must be one of the most challenging times to be in business with Russia and Ukraine pushing worldwide instability and countries trying to recover from Covid with global markets at an all-time low.
Two things will make you succeed and overtake your competitors in these challenging times
- Building multiple revenue streams to support the strength of the balance sheet
- Strong focus around performing competitor analysis workshops to understand your performance in the marketspace.
Everything I have mentioned filters back to understanding your risks and knowing how to manage them and that will determine the difference between success and failure. I have been asked thousands of times over the years, why do businesses fail and if I had to put this into one word, I would say ‘stagnation’. Not focusing on technological advances and adapting to the ever-changing macro environment will result in guaranteed failure.