Everything and everyone needs a safety net in life to protect them when things take a turn for the worst. But businesses need safety nets more than most other things. What with the sheer amount of money they handle. The stock they must protect. The relationships with customers that they must forge and continue to forge. When you think about all these things that a business has to keep on top of at all times, you realise it’s no wonder they need a safety net. And they need safety nets in a number of different areas and aspects at that.
If you are a business owner then one area of your business that definitely needs a safety net is its finances. Business live and die by their finances. If they can’t pay their necessary outgoings, such as their bills and their payroll, then they will be in serious trouble. So, it’s imperative that your business has a financial safety net in place, or knows of such a net. And one safety net that you should know of and seek to use upon the unfortunate event of a financial fiasco is factoring. By using this kind of net you would be able to both easily and legally regulate your cash flow or pay off any general payment problems that your business is experiencing. A factor is a third party company that will buy any outstanding invoices you have off you. This means that you are compensated for the money you are rightfully owed by a customer, even when that customer is refusing to pay up. It also means that you don’t have to waste any money you do have in chasing a customer up. So, factoring is most certainly a financial safety net that you should seek to take full advantage of when you have done business with an unreliable customer. Just make sure to never do business with that customer again, as you don’t want to have to call on your safety net too often!
The call for a safety net to be in place extends itself further than financial and payment issues. It extends itself to issues regarding your stock too. Simply, you have to have a backup space to keep your stock in at all times. This is for a number of reasons. One reason is that the place in which you usually keep stock could become damaged by maintenance issues, such as leaks. It could be that this area becomes out of bounds, possibly because of an infestation of pests. Or the area you usually stock in may even become too full and unable to accommodate anything else. For this reason a safety net in the form of another space to keep your stock is needed. And one such space is a self storage unit. These units are safe spaces in which stock can be kept — whether it be for a few weeks or even for a few months. These spaces are the perfect safe net in regards to stocking spaces because it affords you an opportunity to do something about your current one. It gives you the opportunity to fix whatever it is that has happened to your current space, whether it be maintenance, pest or any other type of issue. It can also afford you time to be able to find another, more permanent space in which to store your stock.
But you can’t always expect external forces to provide your business with a safety net. No, your business needs to provide one for itself too. And a way to do this is for you to do all you can to provide your business a room for error. Yes, you may think that a business can’t be successful when it leaves a room for error. However, only the mantra of ‘there is no room for error’ should be distilled in a business. A business and its employees should only work in this way in order to try and cut down on errors. But there is always an actual room for error in business, and it’s healthy that there is one. In fact, the bigger it is, the healthier it is. By working in a way in which you leave your business more room for ever you instantly give it a safety net to fall back on. And you can leave room for error in a number of ways. One way is to always provide your business with enough time to fulfil customer demands, instead of hurrying the process up. Another way is to always seek to make a little bit more than what is needed to pay the necessary payroll and bill outgoings, and to then save these earnings. By giving you and your business room for error in this way, you create your own safety net.
A safety net is very much something that is to be used on a ‘rainy day’. It is something that is to be used when all else fails and a quick solution is needed. But comparing it to something that is used on ‘rainy days’ doesn’t just have to be metaphorical. No, it can be taken quite literally. You can take it literally in the sense that rain on a particular day may actually affect your business’s profits for the day, because customers either can’t or don’t want to leave their house. Therefore, trying to do as much of your business online as possible is a great safety net to put in place in order to contend with literal rainy days. By creating and building an online marketplace for your business you provide it with a chance to be able to induce customer, no matter the weather. Come rain or shine a customer can access the Internet, which therefore means they can access your business. So, set yourself up a stall in the world of online marketplaces and you provide your business with a quite literal rainy day safety net.
The need to have safety nets in place for your business is massive. Whether it be an external force that you rely on to keep your business safe. Or whether you take action within your business to keep it safe. You simply must do something. Without a safety net, your business will fall, and fall and fall. But with a safety net, your business will only fall a little bit. And when it falls only a little bit it is easy to be pulled back up.
