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Risk, Resilience and Preparedness Podcast - Inside My Canoehead
Risk cannot be eliminated, disasters cannot be prevented and you cannot purchase your way to an insulated life. You can identify, codify, judge and mitigate risk in your professional and private life.
Non-apocalytpic evidence-based risk and preparedness education, for individuals, families, solo-entrepreneurs, businesses and communities.
Your host, Dr. D is a veteran, professor, author and entrepreneur.
No one is coming to help, so you and you alone are responsible for your outcomes. The choice is yours, choose wisely.
Risk, Resilience and Preparedness Podcast - Inside My Canoehead
Financial Resiliency for your Online Business
When we consider financial resiliency in this modern era, we first need to accept resiliency means to you. There are no shortages of definitions of resiliency, in my humble opinion, it is the most abused term in the discipline. As a social scientist, I often lean to our natural scientist colleagues to seek clarity, for their world is far more binary and straightforward, at least in terms of definitions. I’ve quoted this one in the past, resiliency is the “ability to absorb energy and return to stasis”. Translated to social science that means you or your business’ ability to get hit, take the hit and recover to the place you were before you got hit.
Even that foray into terminology is fraught with challenges. What is “absorb”, how far can I fall, how much time do I have to “return to stasis”, what about the “new normal”? The What If Game is alive and well in the field, as with other social sciences tackling the issues of the day.
I’ve written in the past, in my books and in our free guide to preparedness, that every entity needs three plans - their trifecta of preparedness plans, to be best positioned to navigate crisis - the absorb energy portion of the definition. This article deals with the financial plan; for individuals, this is labelled “when you get fired” and for businesses, this is labelled, “when your operations are summarily ceased”.
The cause is irrelevant, your sources of income cease. Framing financial resiliency in these terms eliminates the endless debate about hazard impact, threats from political and economic decisions at all three levels of government and the overall industry. It simplifies the discussion into a single, “what if I stop getting paid scenario”, not the why. The research tells us there is sufficient commonality between hazard induced losses, economic strife and significant political decisions to steer away from attempting to create event-specific plans or strategies. One overarching, well thought out and socialized plan is enough to at least provide a fighting chance.
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