Risk Management

How You Can Ensure Survival Capability by Using Risk Management and Business Planning

Firstly, what is Risk Management?

Quite simply Risk management is in two parts;

A) It is the structured process used to identify all the possible risks and threats that could be harmful and costly to your business.
B) It is then taking the most appropriate measures to eliminate, minimise or reduce those risks and threats.

In order to have an effective Risk Management system in place, a risk analysis must be completed to fully identify and therefore understand what risks and threats you might face in your organisation.

Contact us now to arrange your Risk Analysis of your business.

Why Risk Management is Essential to Every Business and Organisation

Your business is exposed to a complex range of risks, that’s just the nature of being in business. To be assured of Survival Capability, once these risks are identified, they must be controlled or engineered out.

For your more obvious risks such as Employers and Public Liability, Fire, Theft and so on, Cowens will arrange insurance to protect you turning a possible unknown future loss into a known cost that you can budget for.

Clearly, all these risks need to be reduced and controlled, making sure that your premises are safe for employees and the public, installing quality fire and intruder alarms could result in lower insurance premiums and being perceived as a well managed company.

The majority of risks aren’t immediately obvious and so you may miss them completely –

  • How would your business cope with complete loss of power?
  • What impact would losing your IT system for three days have?
  • How would it affect you if you had a major incident like the Buncefield fire close to you?
  • If the roads to your premises were closed for days how much would it impact on you?
  • It may be it’s nothing to do with you and your premises … what about if any of this happened to your major client, what would the likely damage be to you?

Of course there are also financial risks to consider as well;

  • How would major bad debts affect the liquidity of your company – could administration, receivership or bankruptcy threaten?
  • What about employee fraud or embezzlement?
  • How might changes in government legislation affect you?
  • What if Directors were prosecuted under Health & Safety or Environmental laws or held personally responsible for an incident resulting in them losing everything including their homes.
  • How would that affect not just your trading position but your reputation?

It could be argued that these are all highly unlikely, and that may be so, however there is a reason Cowens help you to manage all these risks … it’s because, whilst they’re not all happening every single day, they happen often enough to warrant protecting yourself.

Contact us now to arrange a comprehensive Risk Analysis for your business

So, How can Cowens Help You Achieve Survival capability?

It just isn’t possible to give a totally comprehensive list of what your company might face on this site, it would also make pretty boring reading, so the first thing that must happen is risk analysis and to put in place an appropriately strong risk management system.

Having developed over the past 25 years, the knowledge, expertise, experience, understanding and resources to help and guide you to carry out your risk analysis properly, you can have the peace of mind that Cowens will suggest practical measures to eliminate, reduce or minimise your exposure.

Cowens will provide the tools and technical support to assess the probability of the risk occurring and give you all the information you need to make a qualified commercial decision whether or not to accept it.

The unique Survival Capability systems used by Cowens ensure that we have a comprehensive understanding of your business and the risks you face. With the understanding of your business Cowens will create and implement a solution tailored for your business – not an ‘off the shelf, one size fits all’.
In addition to our design support for your insurance arrangements Cowens can offer help for you to achieve an effective Risk Management programme