Being an entrepreneur comes with a lot of risk-taking. Every risk you take, every business opportunity you skip and every little decision you make can have an impact on your business. With such a huge responsibility hanging on every entrepreneur’s plate, it is no wonder why many are intimidated in taking on such a role. If you plan on being an entrepreneur, know that you will be dealing with many things that will test your patience and abilities. One of which is crisis management.
Crisis management aims to identify and deal with threats that can negatively affect your business. Its main goal is to mitigate the risks and effects of any negative event that affects your brand. There are many costly remorse triggers you will want to avoid when it comes to crisis management. Two of these are as follows.
Dishonesty
Such a breach of ethics can instantly taint you and your business reputation. For instance, you built your dream wellness brand in hopes of changing other people’s lives through your lifestyle brand. If you claim to be a certified nutritionist even if you failed to take up a related course, the truth will eventually come out and will haunt you until you can no longer hide it. Remember that a false persona is extremely difficult to live out. Why claim to be someone you are not when you can easily take a naturopathic nutrition course to support your claims and provide better service to your clients?
Note that you can encounter legal issues for lying. You can lose valuable clients and even turn off potential investors if you try to keep up with such a practice. To avoid such a crisis, make sure to be truthful, share every possible detail to clients, partners, investors, and employees. If caught lying, don’t try to make it worse by thinking of a cover-up. Acknowledge your responsibility and face the consequences.
Not having a contingency plan
One critical factor that can negatively affect your business in times of crisis is not having a contingency plan. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, affecting businesses of all sorts. According to a recent survey, three businesses out of five have a contingency plan in place to deal with the pandemic. This means 39% of businesses were not prepared to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. Due to this, many businesses had a difficult time trying to keep their staff and customers safe while struggling to maintain operations amidst the crisis.
Having a contingency plan lessens your stress and reduces damages in times of crisis. This is why every business must come up with possible solutions to problems that can affect the company in the future. Identify all key risks and prioritize each risk depending on the threat they may cause. Create separate contingency plans for every risk and event identified and outline all actions you can take to tackle each event. Ask for feedback and suggestion from your key employees, share your plan, update these from time to time, and make sure everyone is informed and onboard for any changes.
Crisis management is crucial to keep the business safe, maintain order, and retain its reputation. No matter how great of an entrepreneur you are, there will be times when you will be facing both internal and external issues. The good news is, there are many ways you can tackle such issues, but dishonesty and failure to come up with a contingency plan are not one of them.