It is normal for businesses to get exposed to risks and sudden market change constantly. While many businesses feel the heat, many do not survive these periods. Approximately 25% of businesses do not reopen after unexpected events occur.
Hence, organizations must build resilience to adapt to unexpected events and continue to thrive in difficult situations. This means that businesses must introduce a good measure of business resilience to their processes and operations as it will offer a competitive advantage and help prepare for the inevitable unexpected.
Resilience ranges from actively planning for a difficult situation to adjusting to a new environment and mentally digging deep when facing unexpected challenges. This article will highlight eight tips to help your business prepare for the unexpected to improve resiliency. But first, let’s examine business resilience.
What Is Business Resilience?
Business resilience is an organization’s ability to respond to all types of risk and recover quickly from cyber threats, natural disasters, and other sudden misfortunes. To explain further, businesses can anticipate possible risks, develop strategies to reduce them, and change their operations if an incident occurs. All of this is called business resilience.
8 Tips to Help SMBs Improve Business Resiliency
Here are eight tips to help prepare your business for the unexpected to improve resiliency:
1. Plan and Prepare
One tip to help improve your company’s resilience is to plan for and prepare for unforeseen events such as disasters or recessions. Doing this will help you avoid company failure and get your business through difficult times.
It can be difficult as a business and an entrepreneur to endure challenging times, especially when dealing with unforeseen hardships. Your staff’s self-esteem can take a hit, impacting how the business views itself.
Protect your company by planning and preparing it to become resilient. Learn to recognize changes before they become mainstream, be informed of current happenings, evaluate incidents properly, and take suitable actions.
2. Train Your Staff
Training employees on the abilities required to overcome unanticipated crises is vital to strengthen and establishing effective resilience for your organization. Employees will thrive in almost any scenario if you invest in coaching, training, and mentoring them. This will also set your business up for innovative problem-solving, rebound development, and future opportunity maximization.
3. Develop a risk management plan
A risk management plan is a guide or template customized to your business that protects it from unexpected events that could affect and compromise your business operation.
All businesses, irrespective of size, face many potential risks. While some risks may be crucial to your business growth, exposing your business to the wrong types of risk can cripple your business.
Risks must be continuously reevaluated as your business grows. Therefore, your risk management plan must be active and contain a template that accesses and evaluate risks to reduce crises that could affect your business.
4. Backup sensitive data
As most businesses rely on data for their business operations, data backup should be part of their business’s disaster recovery or risk management plan. Practicing this act will save your business from an unforeseen event. Also, it will provide you with valuable insights and knowledge that you can use to build business resilience.
Likewise, keeping backups in a secure location is critical, such as a cloud storage service.
5. Apply contingency plans
Contingency planning refers to making plans for businesses or organizations that will help businesses respond effectively to unforeseen events. It is like a backup plan that prepares you for unexpected problems, such as data loss, customer loss, or business changes.
The effect of contingency plans is never known until unforeseen events actually come to pass. However, when put into effect, it is bound to assist businesses in remaining active and effective once an issue emerges. Contingency plans typically contain defensive measures and proactive decisions about managing people and financial resources.
6. Hire a security professional
Hiring a security professional to examine your systems and install security measures can help safeguard your company from an unexpected tragedy. A security professional can also give security solutions to secure your data from hackers.
7. Apply business insurance policies
A business insurance policy is a security measure that protects your business against losses or unexpected events that could cost or affect your business growth.
If your business is not fully insured after a loss, it can induce financial destruction. Therefore, every business must have an insurance policy that covers aspects such as facilities, contents of the facilities, inventory, and equipment.
To carry out this effectively, business owners must carefully evaluate which aspects should be insured to ensure they are always protected from unexpected events and accidents.
8. Build cyber resilience
Cyber resilience is the ability of a business to adapt and recover quickly from cyberattacks. As technology advances, businesses must build cyber resilience and protect their organization from data breaches, which are becoming inevitable in transitioning to digital processes.
Early awareness and identification of cyber threats allow organizations to reduce the effects of financial capitulation, theft, and damage while ensuring business operations go on as usual.
Improve Your Business Resiliency Today With PartnerIT
Business resilience entails many aspects of resilience, including cyber resilience. Without cyber resilience, hackers could cause you to lose more than your business, affecting your business’s recovery and reputation. This is why you need to grow your business resilience.
PartnerIT can offer assistance in this regard. We have experienced IT professionals well-versed in increasing a business’ resilience. Contact us today at 519-772-2525 (Kitchener) or 519-672-0900 (London), or reach us online.
