The world is looking very chaotic right now, whataver algorithmic bubble you’re living in I am sure you are fully aware of the state of the world. Business likes predictabilitym and there’s not much of that about right now. So what do you do to insulate your business against the global shocks in the supply chain, oil, gas, “AI” and whatever else is coming to disrupt things?

Teabags and toilet paper, two essentials that most households buy every week. They’re “must haves” not “nice to haves”, now look at your business offering, is it “T&TP” or a non-essential “nice to have”?

That’s not to say discrentionary purchases stop during financial downturns, but fighting for a share of tightening budgets is stressful. Business “wants” will struggle when compared to business needs, like compliance, regulatory, legal and other business essentials.

Over the years I’ve worked on reducing risk in my businesses, after my first went “pop” due to having one customer account for 90% of turnover. Inevitably they had a cashflow issue, which meant we also had a cashflow issue. Lesson 01, don’t have one customer that accounts for 25%+ of your turnover.

Lesson 02, similar to lesson 01, avoid having more than 25% of your customers in one sector, industry or locale. I learned that one during the “credit crunch” and majority of my customers were in finance, banking or the leisure sector and that was goodbye business number two.

Lesson 03, if a customer doesn’t understand your value, then you have none. That ended business 03, too technical, requiring too much explanation during sales and subsequent meetings; business owners didn’t fully understand what we did.

With various iterations and tweaks we’ve reduce the complexity in the business, and now offer a T&TP service with value that is completely apparent, Web Hosting powered by renewables. One product, three variations, depending on size of business, with “upsells”.

Having a subscription service that builds each month, providing businesses a service that’s not optional is proving a winning strategy. Also means cash flows more readily and is unlikely to stop if the economy, a sector or a customer hits a downturn.

What are you doing in your business to reduce the risk of the predicted economic slow-down?