Risk
Signs you should switch suppliers
The right suppliers for your business are the ones that understand your business, want to grow with your business, provide quality input and give you a clear competitive advantage.
Protecting your Intellectual Property
Understanding how to protect one’s intellectual property can be essential for Canadian businesses. It can prevent competitors from using and selling your business' products or services; help differentiate your offering and support your business’s expansion into new territories. Understanding intellectual property can also help you protect your ideas and prevent you from accidentally violating someone else’s. Here’s a primer on some of the things you need to know.
Patents:
What is a risk management plan, and why should I have one?
Why should you have a risk management plan? Risk management is not just about guarding against risks or developing strategies to react to misfortune. It is about continually optimizing your business to maneuver through likely eventualities, both bad and good. It’s just good business to have a risk management plan.
What’s the best software for your business?
No matter what sort of business you own, the right software can help you save time and money. The wrong software, on the other hand, can needlessly complicate even the simplest task, and hurt your ability to do business.
Mitigating Risks
By their very nature, successful entrepreneurs are optimistic. Over time they have
had to overcome numerous unforeseen challenges and they tend to be confident in their
ability to overcome whatever comes their way. It may be this optimism that puts the
discussion of mitigating risk factors far down the list of priorities for some entrepreneurs.
Yet the reality is there are many risk factors that can quickly limit the growth potential of
your small business. Risks can derail the best-laid plans.
The Risk Factor Worksheet
Every business faces risks. This worksheet is designed to provide a framework you can use to identify the risks in your business, assess the degree to which it has the potential to be a catastrophic risk, and create strategies to mitigate the risks you have identified.
Protecting your business against fraud
Whatever the size of your business, reducing and preventing fraud and theft can help your bottom line and protect your reputation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person operation that sells services over the Internet or a retailer with 10 employees and a lot of walk-in traffic. Thieves and fraud artists don’t discriminate. Education is your best line of defense. Here are some tips that can help.
