Guest Blog - HelloRisk

Managing business uncertainty to achieve success

If you’re a small business owner you’re likely to be familiar with having a go at everything: a modicum of marketing, a slice of sales, a bit of invoicing and book-keeping, and a handful of HR. All of that on top of what you started your business to do; the product or service that you love that brings value to your customers. The amount of supporting tasks that are needed to keep you afloat can seem endless.

You might be aware that you need to take risks to thrive, have maybe seen the sobering statistics of how many small businesses fail. Perhaps you’ve even wondered if they failed because they didn’t take the right risks, because they took the wrong risks or just got unlucky. But have you considered taking a deliberate approach to managing risk in your business. If so, is it languishing at the bottom of the list of areas to spend time or money on to advance your business.

Risk management is too often seen as a practice to minimise the chances of failure, to focus on what could go wrong and seek to address that. While this is helpful there is far more uncertainty to consider, that which could bring benefits. We can switch things around and focus on what we should promote or enable, as well as mitigate or avoid, to set ourselves up for the best chance of success. We can gain peace of mind, and maybe sleep, that we’re on top of the uncertainty our businesses face and confidence to pursue our goals as we go forward into the future.

Sounds good right, who doesn’t want to have the best chance of their business being successful, however they might define that. You want to make better decisions, to consider what needs to go right and what could go wrong when formulating your strategy.

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How do you do it?

Let’s lay out some basic steps.

1. Start with your business goals, and their success factors. This should set the context for everything else.

2. What is important to achieving each goal or a combination of goals? How can you measure performance of these, and what targets can you set?

3. What uncertainty exists in their performance? What could threaten to reduce performance and what strengths could you leverage to grasp opportunities to improve performance?

4. What actions can you take to address this uncertainty and the potential impacts on your goals? Keep in mind that the actions to affect one risk may affect others either for good or bad.

Note, this is all deriving from what you’re trying to achieve in your business. Adopting risk treatment approaches from your peers or competitors, or following a generic standard, will not give you an approach to uncertainty that is aligned to your goals. Consequently, such an approach, for all the effort you put in, may not give you the outcomes you need.

Martin Hopkins is a co-founder of HelloRisk and ESAaaS that provide software, consulting, coaching and training for business centric risk management and decision making to businesses of all sizes. Martin is working with the HR by Tara team to deliver risk management services to their clients in people management, HR operations and beyond. Contact martin@hrbytara.com, or a member of the team to get started on bringing peace of mind and confidence to your business.