To business owners, a business represents more than just a way to make a living. Business owners pour their hearts and their souls into their work, putting in blood, sweat, and tears to create a company that they can be proud of. So when a business is exposed to risk, a business owner takes it extremely seriously: there are financial consequences, personal emotions, and questions of legacy at stake when a business is threatened.
Unfortunately, threats to businesses aren’t rare. In fact, they’re extremely common: nearly any type of business has economic, security, and safety threats coming at it from every direction. A business’ competitors exist to outperform and outearn it. There are bad actors willing to hurt businesses and the people in them. And there are risks like fires and floods to be concerned about, too. A good business owner always needs to be thinking about protecting their company.
Economic and Financial Threats
A business exists to make money, of course, but there is always a chance that it will hit rough times. Competitors, bad economies, and disasters of the sorts that we’ll talk about later can all affect a company’s bottom line.
To protect a business from economic lean times, owners should be careful with their cash. Just as an individual should have an emergency fund, so should a business have some liquid cash on-hand.
Sometimes, nothing can stop a company from losing money. That’s why it’s important to set up a business in a legally sound way from the get-go: a business owner’s personal finances should not be affected by business struggles any more than they need to be.
Safety Risks
Like all other pieces of real estate, business spaces face risks from things like fires and floods. That’s why it’s so important for business owners to invest in insurance policies that protect their business spaces. Then, if something goes wrong, the financial consequences of the incident are mitigated. And it’s not just real estate, of course: business owners should also be careful to protect vehicles and other pricey assets with insurance policies of their own.
Business owners can also cut down on the risk of accidents before they happen. Proper safety guidelines are key, and business owners should consider investing in safety training, posters, and other safeguards against employee mistakes and dangerous accidents.
Security Risks
Accidents and acts of God are one thing, but acts of thieves, vandals, and lawbreaking competitors — to name just a few of these types of risks — are another matter entirely. Security is just as important as safety in the business world, and business owners should be willing to invest in the level of security that their business, its location, and its situation merit. This doesn’t have to mean planning out and installing security measures on your own: there are enterprise security risk management businesses (ESRM) that specialize in just this sort of work, which makes it easy to outsource the solution.
There’s only so much that a business owner can do, of course, to avoid problems. But by minimizing the risk of certain types of disasters, and by securing the best possible financial outcome in the event of such a disaster by investing in insurance and setting up a business on secure legal footing, a business owner can rest a little easier at night. When it comes to your financial security, passion, and life’s work, it pays to be a little protective.
