Top strategies to reduce business risk

In a fast-changing world, your business needs to be resilient to adapt, thrive, and succeed. For professional services firms in particular, efficiency is key to success, and staying ahead of a changing business landscape is crucial to continue to deliver the level of service your clients expect.

Reducing business risk is vital to ensure longevity, and there are steps you can take to ensure your business is ready to adapt quickly to change and thrive in challenging circumstances.

Reduce the likelihood of human error

Small mistakes can be costly, and complicated systems and processes within your business can lead to avoidable cases of human error, not to mention slow your business down and lead to employee and client dissatisfaction.

By streamlining your operations and incorporating more automation into your processes via digital technology, you can ensure that costly mistakes are minimised, as well as reducing the amount of time spent on data entry and other resource-consuming tasks.

Investing in digital transformation is an effective way to embed automation and simplified workflows into your business. Implementing digital, cloud-based solutions, shared digitised filing systems, and other data driven technologies allows you to maintain flexibility and a streamlined business model.

As fewer time-consuming tasks are completed manually, your team will have more time to focus on value-adding activities, instead of spending time and resource on data entry or manual processing.

Eliminate siloed working

Workplace silos can lead to any number of errors, miscommunications, duplication of effort, and poor customer service. When it comes to reducing business risk, working to establish more joined up processes and operations across your business is important.

One way to cut out silos is through ensuring everyone has access to the same data. By setting up cloud-based working, and a shared data point, every department and team member is working with a shared source of truth, meaning the risk of miscommunication, or inaccuracies due to out-of-date information is minimised.

Not only does this approach reduce risk to your business through minimising errors, but it also streamlines your business, and helps to improve efficiencies overall.

By implementing technologies and systems within your business to facilitate joined-up, interdepartmental working, you’ll benefit from a more collaborative working environment, and reduce business risk by increasing resilience.

Capitalise on data

An effective way to reduce business risk is to analyse and identify trends within your business’s data, and use this to inform decision making. Data analysis solutions can help you to identify trends in your data using AI, allowing you to focus on applying your findings to your business decisions.

For example, a common starting point is to simply look at how your business has performed in the past. Using historic data, you can analyse how past decisions impacted performance, and use this information to consider where a different course of action may have been more beneficial. With this information, you can make more informed decisions in future, and take into account factors that may only be visible in hindsight.

You can also look at current data trends to identify changes in consumer preferences, common problems, or areas in which your business can be more active.

Plan for probable future scenarios

The best defence is a good offence, as they say – reducing risk means understanding potential threats to your business and planning for likely eventualities. One way to do this is with scenario modelling processes – these take data from your business and analyse it to understand how changes in variables like business decisions, changing rates or new legislation might affect performance.

Scenario modelling tools simplify this process by allowing you to input set costs and overheads, and see how your bottom line could be affected by a range of custom variables.

To effectively manage business risk, you can use these scenarios to make plans for best case, worst case, and likely case circumstances, and make decisions for your company’s future based on these calculations.

Embrace change

The world is constantly changing, and the expectations of customers, consumers, and employees are changing with it. With these shifts in behaviour come new technologies allowing businesses to adapt to new ways of working.

Therefore, it’s important for your business to be ready to embrace new technologies at the right time to ensure you’re well-positioned to flex to changing requirements and stay relevant to your customers’ wants and needs.

Whether it’s implementing a new IT system, introducing different working models, or changing your offering to consumers and clients to meet new challenges, embracing change is vital to ensure your business remains healthy.

That doesn’t necessarily mean jumping on every new trend immediately, but it does mean being aware of what’s out there and how new technologies might affect your business, so that you don’t risk falling behind competitors if they take advantage of a new innovation that boosts their efficiency or performance.

At TSG, we’re experts in managing business risk through the use and implementation of technology.

To find out how we can help your business to keep on top of new solutions and build a technology stack that is right for you, get in touch with our team today.