DIGITAL STARTUP SOCIETY BLOG — Adding Resilience to Your Business

If you want to build a successful business, it helps to look at why businesses fail in the first place. Business failure is so common that many people believe that means they are likely to fail, but the truth is, there are reasons that half of all businesses fail within the first three years – and since there are reasons entirely within your control, you can mitigate for it and ensure your business succeeds. These five reasons that most businesses fail can be changed easily if you know about them.    No Purpose  If you have no idea what your...

If you really want to build a resilient business, it will help you to understand what the characteristics of a resilient business are. Many small business owners, especially when they run a business from their home online, mistakenly think that somehow their business is different from a brick-and-mortar business with 500 employees – and sadly skip over this idea because they believe it does not apply. But it does.   A resilient business doesn't just happen. If you really want to build a business that can take hits and keep on going for the long term, you'll want to understand...

As you design your resilient business, you'll start to realize it all comes down to having dedicated systems and processes in place for the good times and the bad.    Why? Well, no matter who you are or where you live, stuff happens. Weather happens. Illness happens. Heck, sometimes you just wake up, and you're tired and don't want to do the things you planned. Other times the crises happening seems so hard to overcome that you just don't know what to do first, but if you create processes and systems, you can overcome most things, even a lack of...

To build resilience into your business, you'll need to understand that your business continuity plan will provide the resilience necessary to overcome setbacks and disruptions in essence. Business continuity planning consists of examining your business for weaknesses based on known threats that may affect your ability to do business on any given day.    You'll have to go through your processes, systems and examine what you do each day along with the resources you use (human and otherwise) to help you mitigate problems and issues. Business continuity planning includes:   Determining and listing possible types of distributions – You need...

It doesn't matter who you are or how many resources you have available, something will happen within the next year, or so that will disrupt your business somehow. It may be a family matter, a purely business issue inside your operation, or it may be an external matter entirely out of your control – but it is going to happen.   Because of the certainty that disruption happens, having a plan in place that makes your business more resilient to these influences is imperative. The thing that causes problems is going to happen, and probably more than once. But no...