While there are exciting opportunities to be had in the year ahead, there are also a number of risks that businesses should look to mitigate going forward. For firms that have lived through the coronavirus pandemic, supply chain disruption, rising energy bills, and a global inflationary crisis, there has already been much on their plates. In this article, we’ll look at the extra measures you can put in place to refocus on growth and thriving, ensuring that your survival is future-proofed. Read on to learn the best practice to protect your firm in 2024.
Insurance
The word insurance should spring to mind when you’re thinking about risk, protection, and security. It’s your backbone when things go wrong, helping you to fish into reserves of cash that you’re unexpectedly required to provide. Often, insurance will cover some of the basic operations of a business, helping to protect a company’s workforce from harm and the business itself from some of the most common dangers. But there are other forms that are especially useful for larger firms which are generally exposed to more risks.
Take, for instance, employment practice liability insurance, or EPLI for short. This is a policy that smaller businesses may not consider purchasing but which larger companies with dozens or hundreds of employees may do well to purchase. You can learn more here about what this insurance protects you from, but in short, this is your protection from employee lawsuits against your conduct, which can often be both highly distracting and financially draining for your firm.
Assessing Risks
Not all risks will be serious enough for you to consider insuring yourself against. There are other risks, of course, that you cannot insure yourself against at all. In both of these cases, you’ll need to think about other ways in which you can avoid or mitigate risks, whether that means working hard to make your business more watertight or planning ahead in order to think outside of the box when it comes to the things that could befall your firm.
In a sense, this is the kind of high-level thinking that should take place in strategy meetings in your firm. As well as adjusting your positioning to appeal to buyers and delight your customers and clients, you should also pay heed to the many risks that could affect you down the line. Among these are a drop in sales, a reputational issue, and the outage of your website and your web assets. All of these issues should be carefully planned against in advance so you know how to respond if and when issues do affect your business.
Cashflow
In an era of acute financial concerns on the part of consumers and businesses alike, a wise strategy for firms looking into 2024 with some trepidation is to ensure that they have a little more cash in the bank than they might previously have left there. A little extra money can help you float through periods of unexpectedly low sales or respond to costs you hadn’t anticipated before.
Making more of your assets liquid might require you to make some difficult decisions. You may need to let some of your staff go, sell a part of your business, or consider selling some of the other assets that you’ve amassed on the financial markets. This decision shouldn’t be taken lightly, but it’s something that you can certainly do if you’re lacking confidence in how you should approach 2024.
Workforce
There are currently dozens of worker disputes taking place across the US and many hundreds taking place across Europe. The complaint is often the same: that in a period of high inflation, firms should be matching that inflation with pay rises of their own. For your firm, this might not feel as if it’s a significant factor in how you should approach 2024. Yet if wages are growing around you while yours remain stagnant, you might find that you’re losing staff to better-paid jobs quicker than you had expected.
To mitigate this risk, you can take the very simple step of increasing pay for your workers. You should keep your ear to the floor when it comes to their concerns, as it might not be pay that they’re so concerned about but job security. If you can offer them some words of comfort during what is a difficult economic period, you’ll encourage loyalty to your brand during a period when you need all hands on deck to steer your business to a more profitable future.
Strategy
Finally, the success of your strategy for the coming year will ultimately determine how many of these issues you are likely to face and how many you have insulated yourself against with smart planning. When you’re conducting strategy meetings at your firm, consider that every wise decision you make is itself a form of protection. Risks are inherent in business and shouldn’t be avoided at all costs, nor should you engage in excessive risk-taking if the risks are just as great as the rewards.
Whenever you’re planning a new strategy for your business, it’s always important to focus on what you can do to keep yourself as far from issues and threats as possible. Run your strategy past your most senior staff to get their take on some of the potential issues on the road ahead. Above all, be patient, calm, and long-sighted. The coming year could be a brilliant one for your firm.
Technology
A final tip is to think about the technology that you can bring into your business to perform better as a team and become more productive. Technology, according to Forbes, can make your whole operation more efficient and less costly, which can have a significant impact on how your firm is able to avoid risks and threats in the coming year. Conduct an audit of your current processes to find areas in which you might be able to tweak your approach with the use of software or automation, saving you cash and allowing you to focus on reinvesting and strengthening elsewhere.
Avoid threats and plan for an exciting future by taking into account the advice contained in this article.