Top Ways to Make Your Business More Resilient

If a company is resilient, this essentially means that it is unlikely to go bankrupt.

While some businesses are highly vulnerable to changes in the market or have a very precarious financial balance, a resilient business is one that can survive for years.  Even without turning a profit and going through all kinds of recessions and changing trends.

As you can imagine, it’s certainly a desirable thing for a business to be considered resilient. So the question is, how do you go about achieving that?

Savings

One way to ensure your business is resilient is simply to have some savings put away, even if you’re just investing in frozen assets that can be liquidated at a certain point in the future.

Some companies get this wrong and will coast along just breaking even and ensuring everyone gets their salary. Others will get this wrong for different reasons and will continuously invest in new projects and ideas.

The smart business does both these things while at the same time taking some of the profit and putting it aside for a rainy day. Just as you have rainy day funds for your personal finances, a resilient business needs these too.

Multiple Revenue Streams

Another important way for a business to be more resilient is for it to have multiple revenue streams. This means that it’s making money not just from a single product or service but from several at the same time. Now, if one of those products should stop making money, it will still have others that can carry on bringing in the funds.

Multiple Brands

You can actually take this further still and give your business multiple brands. An example this in action is the company Virgin. Virgin is a single company, but it has multiple different brands all operating independently – Virgin Media, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Active…

The great thing about this is that if any one area of Virgin should struggle, the others can ‘pick up the slack’. The only possible way for Virgin to fail is if multiple legs of the business should give way at once. In this way it is truly built to last.

Contingency Planning

Finally and most straightforward – make sure you are planning ahead for your business and thinking of every possible scenario. Create as many ‘what if’ scenarios as possible and make sure you have a plan for each of them that will allow your business to continue thriving.

Think like this when you’re creating your own business: are you building it to last? Have you thought of every contingency?