I asked you a while ago, to consider how at risk your online business is but there’s also another side to the coin which is this: In this volatile climate, how resilient is your business?

While risk planning is all about preparing for the unknown, resilience is all about recovering from it.

In essence, it’s about how quickly your business could bounce back from a crisis. And can it bounce back even stronger?

If you’re anything like me, your business may already be fairly resilient.

I say this not as someone who has experienced a devastating, business-destroying event, but as someone who has pivoted many, many times, and as someone who has strategically (or at least with a lot of pondering) deliberately put the kibosh on business ventures and income streams.

I’m used to starting again, bringing something to life, creating something out of nothing. You may wonder how and why this is possible…it’s all about building and cultivating the right assets.

Here are a few key assets you might want to start taking better care of…

Your Contacts & Network

Your network is one of the most valuable assets your business has – your existing customer base, in particular. Should one of your ventures go belly up, being able to get something else up and running quickly, by reaching out to existing contacts, and an already-familiar customer base, is an asset you can’t replace (or buy).

Also, ensure you have a broad base of contacts – connecting with people from related fields (both directly and indirectly) – can help reduce your reliance on just one market and give your business more resilience and protection from industry-wide disruptions.

Practice to Cultivate: Pay regular care and attention to cultivate your connections. I like Contactually to help me get into the habit of doing this (although once you’re done one run through, the daily notifications can get a tad annoying – just turn them off!).

Cash

If you had to invest cash in business assets such as a website and other online tools and systems the first time round, you’ll need to cash to invest in them again if they’re destroyed.

Having a ‘resilience fund’ or an emergency backup fund is not only advisable, it’s a must-have if you know that in order to get it back on its feet again, your business is going to need some kind of starter investment.

Practice to Cultivate: Pay into an “Emergency  Fund” on a regular basis. To make it easy on yourself, set up a regular automated payment and forget about it. Even if you feel you can’t afford much, aim for say £5 per week. You’ll be surprised how quickly it builds up and how the weekly approach is almost not noticeable.

Backups

You can mitigate the investment needed to get back up and running again if you keep good backups of your existing business assets – things like backups of your website, backups of your digital products and backups of your customer database & sales pipeline.

Many online services offer the ability to export your data – do this on a regular basis and keep copies in several places.

Practice to Cultivate: Set up a monthly reminder to make all your backups – or get your VA to do this for you.

Our websites are all automatically backed up daily (with 1-click restore functionality) by our preferred hosting company, I have backup copies of all our digital products stored in the cloud (in 2 places – Dropbox & Amazon S3) and for each online service which allows it, I download and take a backup copy of my data at regular intervals – including my Google Calendars & all the files in my Google Drive.

You

You are your biggest asset – it’s a cliché but it’s true. Everything you learned the first time round can be brought to bear on every other venture you start.

Honing your skills on an ongoing basis and deepening and broadening them means that your ability to bounce back each and every time becomes much more of a sure thing. And obviously, taking good care of yourself as a regular practice is important too.

Practice to Cultivate: Find your own self care routine and stick to it! The one that works for me: gym on the days that Mali’s at playschool. This alone is enough to motivate me to eat well, sleep well and keep my energy levels up.

As for skills – honing them ‘on the job’ keeps me pretty up to speed, but I also make an effort to read around widely on topics and subjects which are not directly related to what I do. Find your own self- and professional development rituals and practice them. Regularly.

It’s never a pleasant exercise thinking about the worst case scenarios; it’s even less pleasant living through them.

With just a few mindful practices built into your schedule, you can build and increase the resilience of you and your business.