How to Protect Your Organization From the Amazon of Your Industry

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article | How to Protect Your Organization From the Amazon of Your IndustryThe trend towards consolidation in industry has become a threat to any business whose leadership has a desire to maintain its own identity and strategic path. If you think you, your company, or your industry is immune, I urge you to look at the telltale signs.

If you are one of those business owners or leaders who have invested many years of your life building a brand, then you most likely have a vision for that brand for the future that exists beyond your involvement. Sure, you could decide to sell the business or have it acquired by another organization, but the control of the decision should be yours.

So what do you do if you’d like the company to stand alone moving forward?

The Hidden Threat That Many Do Not See

Many signs of corporate consolidation are apparent; we read about them in journals and online every single day. XYZ corporation announces the acquisition of ABC LLC, etc. Mergers and acquisitions have been around forever, but there is a new legal form of conquest that is allowing organizations to steal market share from well-established businesses. Does it exist (yet) in your niche?

The menace of which I speak is the digital marketing organizations that are springing up in most industries, offering services on a pay-per-lead basis. If you are an established business, you likely have encountered one or more (or your marketing department has), and perhaps you have even paid for their services. These organizations spend their resources online, gaining a marketing edge, and then sell you (or your competition) the data on the leads. It seems like a win-win relationship at first.

But consider this. Isn’t this type of behavior, by you and your competition, outsourced marketing? No big deal, right? They spend money to generate consumer information, and then you buy it. Outsourcing frees you up to focus on things other than creating new business opportunities. It’s a true parasite-host relationship, where your organization serves as the host, and the digital marketing organization serves as a benevolent parasite.

Over time, the parasite will get large and robust. It will more than likely service many companies, not just your own. When they hit a point of market saturation, who do you think will be the most prominent brand known to the consumer? You? A competitor? No! It will be the digital marketing company that has been growing its reach across digital channels.

I believe that at this point, the digital marketing organization will have the leverage, and it is then that the parasite begins to consume the host. They raise the price on your cost per lead. If you refuse to pay, they merely sell the information to a competitor. Or worse, they quit selling information exclusively; instead, they sell the same information to multiple organizations. Once they are large enough in the eyes of consumers, they have the leverage to do this.

Would you like some real-world examples of this? Look no further than Zillow in real estate or Homeadvisor in the home services sector. These marketing-only organizations started simply with a website, but now each is the biggest name in its field. Zillow is now buying homes and working directly with home sellers. Can it be much longer before they have a buyer service available?

How To Avoid The Digital Marketing Parasite

If you own, lead, or manage an organization, acknowledge that the primary task of any business is the generation of new customers. You cannot outsource marketing, or it will put your company in a position to finance the organization that will one day put you out of business.

Take care of the parasite when it is a pest. Ensure that you run a learning organization that evolves its marketing strategy to utilize the same channels and processes that the parasite would use to unhinge you.

The parasite exists in every location and every field. Do not make the mistake of outsourcing business generation responsibilities. Instead grow your digital marketing solutions so that your company can thrive and grow into the future.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Joe ManausaJoe Manausa is CEO of Joe Manausa Real Estate in Tallahassee, Florida and author of The Business of Getting Business: The Digital Marketing Guide for Small Businesses.  After observing industry giants move to a digital-first marketing approach, Joe made the transition within his own company, which resulted in over $10 million of revenue from the business’s website.  For more information, please visit lidpublishing.com or https://www.digitalmarketingforbusinessbook.com/.

How You Can Protect Yourself as a Business Owner

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Protect your Business|How You Can Protect Yourself as a Business OwnerRunning a business is challenging and can be extremely stressful at times. Many things can go wrong, from losing a client or a slump in sales to an employee threatening legal action against you. This is why you must have things put in place to protect your business and yourself as the business owner. Here are some ways that you can do this.

Insurance

Every business needs insurance, and it is illegal to being trading without it. There are many different covers you can have included in your policy, but things like errors and omissions, business interruption, general liability, and worker’s comp cover are the most common. Your insurance policy will help protect you financially and legally for things that are included in the policy. Even if you think certain events are unlikely to happen, it’s better to protect yourself against unforeseen circumstances that could potentially ruin your business.

Employment Law

If you’re going to hire employees to work for your company, which is most likely, it’s worth becoming familiar with the employment laws. It’s better than you have at least some basic understanding of what your rights are as an employer and what your obligations are to your staff. If you are struggling to comprehend the employment law, seek the advice of an attorney who can explain this to you in terms that you understand.

Accountant

Your business finances are essential. Without a healthy revenue stream coming in, your business will struggle to stay afloat and could potentially go bankrupt. It can be challenging to control your finances effectively, especially if your sales are taking a hit. However, you still need to make regular outgoing payments for this like rent on office space, employee wages, bills, and so forth. Hiring the help of a professional accountant could help you protect your business’s financial health by advising you on areas where you can save money and how to make the best reinvestments into the business. They can also monitor any suspicious activity that appears in your accounts, which could save you from legal issues and financial ruin.

Human Resources

Smaller businesses might not be able to hire a specific HR team, but every business should have an HR representative to protect both the company and the staff. HR is responsible for mediating and taking record of conversations regarding grievances in the workplace, whether that be between two staff members or an employee and the employer. They will try to resolve the issue at work to avoid it escalating to legal action; however, if this does happen, they will also be there to help with the situation along with the hired legal time.

Contracts

Finally, you should always have contracts drawn up for anyone you are doing business with. From employees to suppliers, having these contracts in place will be proof that you have agreed on specific terms of service. They will also make the other party more comfortable and hold you accountable for your end of the agreement.

You must protect yourself as a business owner. Many things could go wrong, therefore, don’t allow yourself to get caught out by not thinking about these basic things that you should have in place.

8 Leading Areas for Change In Risk Management/Analysis In The Coming Years

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Risk Management|Risk Management and Where It Could Go In a Foreseeable FutureBottom-line performance is a vital aspect of any business. Managers and people in higher positions, in general, are always looking for ways to improve bottom-line operations and minimize the risks. Risk management helps them stay on top of the market challenges and trends in the relevant industry.

However, markets and industries are dynamic concepts. To answer the latest challenges, risk analysis has to be active as well.

More Precise Risk Models

Predominantly relying on the human workforce makes risk models way too complicated. Risk management cannot be efficiently applied to risk models that have too many factors to account for. It’s one of the most significant areas for change in risk analysis in the coming years.

To assess the risk, companies will be advised to simplify the risk models and thus help themselves. With simpler risk models assessing risks and delivering relevant strategies to mitigate them will become significantly more comfortable than today.

Some of the strategies we will see are process automation and streamlined communication, both internally and externally.

Digitization

Risk management, as we know, it will definitely change in the coming years. Scanning is an ongoing process most businesses are exposed to. Some of them directly, others indirectly. Anyhow, the digitization itself offers away too many benefits for companies to leave it behind because it brings new risks.

The digital era has also brought to light new business models facing brand new risks, which makes digitization a leading area for change in risk analysis. People in the risk management industry will have to identify these emerging and evolving risk types and integrate them into the existing risk models.

Interconnectedness and Collective Risk Management

Businesses across the world have become an integral part of the networked economy. Interconnectedness comes with a great many benefits – quickly penetrating new markets and growing customer base, being just a few of them. Meanwhile, supply chains have become more complex.

Businesses actively engage on different levels with different external stakeholders. All of this, at the same time, creates a network of risks. Market risk analysis slowly shifts toward a joint effort.

All businesses in this network will have to rely on their partners that they can identify, manage, and reduce risks. It will definitely change risk management in the days to come.

StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Risk Management|Risk Management and Where It Could Go In a Foreseeable FutureRisk Management in Real-Time

The digitization and interconnectedness allow for new risks that some organizations don’t have experience with. All this calls for a pervasive approach to risk management.

Being able to assess and minimize the risks in-house and outside will become a leading practice in many industries. It will push risk analysis toward the use of technology and software solutions.

How will the risk assessment field answer to these new challenges? One of the possible answers is pursuing opportunities to monitor and manage risk in real-time. The technology is already here. There are different types of sensors and tracking and monitoring solutions that can help streamline manage risks and mitigate it before there is a need for damage control.

Risk Transfer Instruments

The most common risk transfer instruments are contracts and insurance. They are widely used across verticals to cushion the blow of unforeseen circumstances and allow businesses to continue their operations. Two main factors driving change in risk analysis are financial institutions and risk events with potentially the most significant impact on business.

The financial industry is always working on coming up with new financial instruments to help businesses monetize and transfer risk. It will be a great challenge to assess whether or not to invest in these instruments.

On the other hand, risk events that could potentially have a high impact on operations are imminent. The climate change, cyberattacks, and the global pandemic are just a couple of them.

StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Risk Management|Risk Management and Where It Could Go In a Foreseeable FutureFeasible Level of Risk-Taking

Markets are becoming saturated and more volatile as we speak. The competition is harsh out there, and that creates a frame of reference in which businesses can do little without intentionally taking risks. At the same time, deliberately taking risks drives change in risk analysis.

Finding new ways to accurately identify, assess, and measure risks are becoming more important as we speak. Organizations will turn to calculate the accurate upside value for a chance to be able to decide whether it is feasible to continue operations while taking risks intentionally.

Enabling sustainable risk-taking is potentially the area that’s going to change the risk analysis the most. Managing risk will start drifting away from only identifying the risks that have to be avoided towards taking risks to drive value, performance, and productivity.

AI To Help Human-led Risk Management

AI, machine learning, and big data are driving changes across verticals. Risk analysis is not an exception. The formulas, knowledge, and experience risk managers leverage to stay on top of managing risks are simply not enough. The landscape has become way too dynamic to identify and assess all the risks.

The technologies mentioned above will help businesses extend their market risk analysis practices and make them error-free. Smart tools can detect, predict, and prevent risks the very moment they become a real threat. The best thing about it is that these are fully autonomous systems capable of self-managing risks entirely on their own.

Risk Insights and Behavioral Science

The human factor is a crucial piece for solving the risk puzzle. Risky behavior is the subject of many new studies in the fields of social, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences. The findings can’t be ignored. Thanks to the systematic approach, the studies have identified the factors and personality traits correlated with risky behavior.

The results of these studies are already changing the risk analysis landscape. We can already see some organizations having a Chief Behavioral Officer on the payroll. At this point, it’s safe to assume that the results of these studies are going to drive at least some new changes in risk management practices.

To answer the new threats, risk management will have to move closer to a model based on proactive, real-time, and technology-powered practices. These eight areas have the most impact on market risk analysis and risk management, in general, and will most definitely change it in the coming years.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Gracie MyersGracie Myers is a content writer at Research Optimus. She enjoys writing on various topics mainly associated with Research. Her famous articles are on the topic of Business Research, Market Research, Business Analytics and many more.

How To Safeguard Your Company Data

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article | How To Safeguard Your Company DataIt doesn’t matter what kind of business you run, you will need to take steps to safeguard your company data, and that of your customers, from cybercrime and data loss. Losing important business information or having it stolen by a hacker could easily spell the end of your enterprise altogether, and it will certainly have a negative impact on your reputation. Therefore, it makes sense to put in safeguarding measures to protect the information and yourself. Here are some ways to do it.

Back Up

Backing up your information is simple and effective. Although it won’t protect against an attack by a cybercriminal by itself, it will allow you to restore the potentially missing or corrupt information left in the hacker’s wake, or as a result of a system failure.

If you can restore the information then you can continue working, even if there are other problems that still need to be dealt with. Without a backup of your work, you may well lose everything and have no way of continuing your business at all.

The most important thing to remember about making backups is that you will need to use a reliable external source to do it. There is no point in backing up your information to another computer on the same system; this is not going to keep it safe. Ideally you should use the cloud as not only will the information be protected but you can access it from anywhere – this is perfect if you are unable to get to your office or if there was a fire, for example, that destroyed your computing equipment.

Use A Firewall

A firewall will give you an extra line of defence against cyberattack. It works as a barrier against any malicious software that you may have inadvertently downloaded. This barrier, when correctly installed, will ensure that the virus cannot reach the more vulnerable and important parts of your computing system, blocking it completely.

The idea is a simple one, but there are many different types of firewall and it can become confusing and even overwhelming when you start to look more deeply into it. Because of this, it is best to have IT services Birmingham find the right firewall for you and install it – that way you know you are protected.

Password Protection

It is possible to set passwords on some programs such as Adobe Acrobat and the Microsoft Office suite. This adds an extra layer of security so that only those who have the password are able to open the document.

You can even password protect entire folders and networks if you want to and feel that this would be a useful protective measure that will safeguard your company data. When you are choosing a password, it must be something unique that cannot be guessed easily; never use phone numbers or birthdates or names. For the best password, you should use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Although this will be harder to remember, it will also be harder to guess, so your information will be much safer.

Protecting Your Business From The Threat Of Cybercrime

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StrategyDriven Risk Management and Managing Your Business Article |Cybercrime|Protecting Your Business From The Threat Of CybercrimeThere are many threats to each and every business the whole world over. You might look at your company and think that just because you are only a small operation, then you won’t be at risk. But there is one thing that is a fact, cybercriminals do not discriminate.

Whether your business is worth billions, or you are a sole-trader, you are likely to come under attack. You might currently be facing several attempts each day. Although, depending on the type of business that you operate, this could be considerably more.

What Effects Will A Cyber Attack Have On Your Business?

In the event of an attack, and the very least, cybercrime will cause your websites and services to suffer from downtime which will have a financial knock-on. The outcome will generally be much worse.

You might end up losing customer data, which will result in mass-identity theft. You may face fines from the government if the breach could have been prevented, and you might face legal proceedings from affected customers.

All in all, you are likely to lose a lot of money and face severe damage to your reputation. It might all result in you going out of business completely.

How Can You Protect Your Business?

There are many ways that you can protect yourself. Firstly, you should make sure that you are following the best practice guides for data protection in your specific industry. If you are handling customer or client information, you have a duty to ensure stringent measures are in place to protect the data. Where you are working with data that is particularly sensitive, for example, financial information or even medical records, you may have additional regulations to adhere to because of the increased risk that you face.

One of the best ways that you can ensure that you are fully protected is to use the services of an IT specialist or a Managed Service Provider. You can learn more about the various services that an IT support team will be able to provide in order to help your business to protect itself.

What Measures Can You Take In House?

Keeping your business safe from cyberattacks is something that everyone in your business should be doing. It is so important that you should create policies and procedures around the threat, and implement a whole raft of training measures to ensure your team understand the risks and know how to take measures to keep your business safe.

Change passwords often. If your team are all changing their password every month to something that is new and unique, you will be able to minimize the risk of front-door access to your systems via stolen passwords.

Train your staff on phishing emails. Your team need to know not to click on links in emails, even if they look legitimate.

Use multifactor logins. By including a biometric element or a personal question as a secondary stage of any login, you can minimize the risk of anyone but the correct user logging in.

Never share passwords. Every employee needs their own unique login. If people share logins, it increases the risk dramatically.