Are You Too Supplier Dependent?

In this episode of Get to the Contest Small Business Podcast, I want to talk to you about something that’s often overlooked by small business owners—It’s all about supplier relationship and your business reliance on them. I'm not just talking about suppliers of products, but also suppliers of services, referrals, and more.
Listen in as I talk you through a few scenarios of supplier reliance and let’s take a look on how these circumstances may affect your businesses.

In this episode we answer the following questions and some tips to overcome them:

• What happens if your supply goes broke?
• What happens if your supplier is taken over?
• Do you have a relationship with a supplier business, or do you just have a relationship with an individual at that supplier?
• What if your supplier just retires?
• There are unforeseen sudden changes in supplier circumstance. What happens next?
• What if your suppliers are exposed to change in the political climate?
• If your main financier stops financing you, perhaps due to a change of policy and you can no longer have your facility, are you instantly cooked as a business?
• There’s a sudden supply interruption outside of your control—what do you do when you can’t get the products that you’ve ordered?
• What are the risks in relying too much on a specific marketing medium or something as public and free like as social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter?

Here are some key takeaways from this episode:

Conduct a risk review. Go through and look at your business at the various mentioned risk factors and see what applies to your business and make no assumptions that the status quo will be in place.

Look at the likelihood of each risk. I know some of these things might seem unlikely, but also look at the size of the damage to your business should something happen. Now, that will then lead you to a course of action where you either take steps to reduce the likelihood of the event happening, or you take steps to reduce the damage that would occur if the event did happen.

Do this assessment on an annual basis because as your business grows and evolves, so will its risk. And so will your supplier's risk change and evolve as well. So, do this on a regular basis, just to make sure that your assumptions around your business continuing, your business just doesn't fall apart due to something that's beyond your control that happens to a supplier.