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Helping you understand and deal with the unplanned risks of doing business.

REDUCING THE RISKS OF DOING BUSINESS

When you launch a business, all efforts are directed towards growth, commercial success and profitability. Often there is no immediate perceived need to establish failsafe measures to protect your business from contingencies and grief attacks. Maybe you have omitted to address business risks for the sake of reaching timely profitability? 

As an established operation, you feel well adjusted to your market and you rely on strong values that make you successful, building on processes that seem anchored like reliable roots. Are you sure that your internal organization is fully able to detect all risks and threats for your business? 

It is usually too late to stop the slide once it starts. Enron went bankrupt in a domino effect of financial and contractual triggers. A well-known financial player lost all its operations and most of its staff in the WTC collapse. 

In whatever phase of development your business is in, now is the time to welcome an external, fresh and professional look at the risk of doing business. It is time to take time out and reflect on what could affect the stability and continued success of your business. 

Checking out where you stand in the risk scale and identifying quick wins and imperative measures against major risks is what you may want to do to better protect your company.

THE MONSTER BOOK OF MONSTER RISKS

Risks have many causes and may impact businesses to different degrees of severity. Little risks are sometimes perfidious. They may cascade to life threatening monster risks. It is a necessity to identify those risks that can affect your company in a material adverse fashion. 

The risks that you know best are of course linked to your day-to-day activities, to your business. These can affect your operation, facilities, personnel, debt capacity, and so on. Add also the numerous commercial risks: changes in market demand, prices or costs. However, dealing with them day-to-day can lead to familiarity and can create organizational blind spots. 

Often overlooked but potentially even more painful, are contingency risks. In contracts these are labeled “Force Majeure”, which seems to be a license to entitle you to forget them. These are the events that every once in a while happen to your competitors and which sends them reeling. Of course they will never happen to you.

Even more unimaginable are the risks from grief that may be directed towards your company or just a gratuitous act. These most of all should not be underestimated. A wide-ranging and systematic approach to the assessment of your risks is what 4C&B proposes. We help you identify those un-planned risks and help you manage them for continued success.