Whether you like it or not, risks are commonplace in business. It is the most important factor separating an employee from an entrepreneur. If risk is a part of your day to day life, just how are you going to handle it? How can you decide between acceptable risks and unacceptable risks? Every small business owner needs to learn how to handle risks. Here’s what you can do.
Accept That You’ll Have to Take Risks
Running a business isn’t easy. It’s a gamble. You’re investing your time, effort, and money. You’re compromising your financial security by giving up a steady job and a pay cheque. You’re doing all of this on a gamble that your business would take off and your idea is solid. That’s the biggest risk to take. Most business owners end up on the verge of bankruptcy if their business fails.
That’s a risk that every business owner has to acknowledge and accept. You will have to face some financial loss and heightened stress. If you can’t accept these facts, running a business cannot be your career. You won’t be able to fully commit to your venture and have the tenacity to push the limits. If you don’t do that, your business will fail.
Understand the Types of Risks
There are different kinds of risks but what you need to concern yourself with are the calculated and uncalculated risks. They decide whether a business succeeds or fails. If you know that you’re making a gamble, you need to go in with your eyes wide open. You need to understand the repercussions of your actions.
If you don’t do that, you won’t be able to anticipate problems and deal with them before they drown your business. With calculated risks, you understand what you’re doing. With uncalculated or ambiguous risks, you’re relying on limited amount of information. You don’t know the full repercussions of your decisions.
There might be variables that you won’t be able to understand or predict. For example, you can’t completely predict customer behaviour. Market conditions are also known to change abruptly. However, sometimes, these are the risks you’ll have to take.
Not All Risks Will Yield Results
You need to be prepared for failure. Not all the gambles you make will pay off. Some people are under the impression that the bigger their risk, the better the reward. But that’s rarely the case. Taking big risks because of the rewards is never a good idea. However, being afraid of risks wouldn’t help you either.
Your only option here is to accept that you will face failure, regardless of how much you prepare. Some risks will offer rich rewards, while others will be epic failures. When you acknowledge this fact, you’ll be able to deal with the fall out of the risks in a more composed manner.
Risks are inevitable in business, but you can’t run a business without them. It’s the one constant in business. You’ll have to make those difficult choices and hope for the best.
