With all the events that transpired in the last few years, running a startup business is now more challenging. For your business to survive, you need to toughen it up. And outsourcing can be an effective strategy in improving that resilience. Find out how you can take advantage of it for your business development.
Understanding Business Resilience
Simply put, business resilience is the ability of your startup company to adapt to disruptions in the business landscape. That involves safeguarding your business assets and brand equity to ensure continuous operations. It also aims to provide post-disaster strategies to help your business recover faster.
The effort can sometimes be confused with business continuity. However, the two differ in scope. Continuity mainly refers to your company’s ability to deliver goods or services at acceptable levels even after a disruption. Meanwhile, resilience encompasses its ability to survive such disruptions. It builds upon the principles of continuity to strengthen your company. Thus, the two are interconnected.
The Elements Of Startup Business Resilience
As already mentioned above, much of the process of building your business resilience stems from ensuring business continuity. Hence, its elements also come from that strategy. Understanding these elements are and what role they play will help you develop a more effective resilience plan.
Startup Business Impact Analysis
This component helps you predict possible business disruptions and how they will impact your startup business. Some information that the analysis provides include:
- The changes that happen during unplanned interruptions
- Legal or regulatory repercussions of the disruption
- Business units necessary for continuity of operations
- Key personnel and support staff
- Pre- and post-disruption dependencies
- Order of operations and rank of priorities
- Recovery strategy
This information will form the backbone of your resilience plan. Thus, spend enough time collecting and interpreting everything.
Risk Assessment
Image from Renomia.
This is a thorough study of the potential risks that your business can encounter. Consider all the aspects of your operations. You should also include the specific assets that might be affected by these risks. The final part would be a thorough analysis of the actual impact on these areas.
Critical Functions
Next, you need to zoom in on the critical functions that disruptions can affect. These functions are the ones that your business relies on to continue operations. They include:
- Core business functions
- Payroll
- Revenue operations
- Security
- Identity and access management
Once you have identified these, you can determine how to allocate resources for them. These functions should be immediately operational after a disruption to maintain the business.
Communications
When a disruption occurs, you should quickly get in touch with all the stakeholders. Hence, you need a communications strategy. Start by consolidating all the stakeholders’ contact information into one collection. Determine which channels would best suit the particular disruptions you might encounter.
Service Level Agreements
Image from CIO.
SLAs define the acceptable level of service that internal and external partners provide. When developing these for the overall contract, you should also incorporate the expected levels for cases of disruption. Additionally, identify the key personnel and their successors who will ensure these levels are met during such situations.
Testing
Once you have your continuity and resilience plan, you want to ensure that it works as intended. Doing regular testing will help ensure that everything falls into place. During these tests, evaluate how well your startup company can respond to such events. Identify the gaps in your strategy and what measures you can do to resolve them.
How Outsourcing Helps Your Startup Business Build Resilience
With all of the above elements, implementing your business continuity and resilience plan on your own can be challenging. This is where outsourcing comes in. The main thrust here is that the strategy can help you maintain operations during significant disruptions.
The COVID-19 pandemic is arguably the biggest proving ground for that idea. During its peak, companies found themselves contending with labor shortages due to the various travel restrictions. Outsourcing became the go-to solution for many businesses. With it, they were able to redistribute work to remote partners. That lets them continue operations without needing a specific physical location.
Another great thing about outsourcing is that it allows companies to access talents faster. That is especially helpful in dealing with the other effects of the pandemic. For instance, the Great Resignation resulted in a mass exodus of regular employees. Companies used the strategy to respond to this sudden development.
Outsourcing Resilience
While outsourcing’s main role in many business resilience plans is providing the necessary work force to continue operations, it can also offer more than that. You can also outsource the development and implementation of these plans themselves.
Image from AutoBCM.
This option is useful as another safeguard for your resilience efforts. By having experts handle the development and implementation, you can be sure of it succeeding. They can also provide you with better strategies for tackling more varied scenarios.
Boosting Your Startup Business Resilience More With The Right Partner
Of course, to succeed in outsourcing your resilience efforts, you need the right partner. This is where the above components will be handy. With a clear plan, you can create a more thorough selection process for the provider.
We at Virtua Solutions are always prepared to become that partner. Our team has been helping clients prepare even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Through our help, they were able to continue operations and create a post-pandemic recovery strategy.
When you sign up with us, we put resilience as one of the priorities when developing our partnership. That means every aspect of our work is geared towards providing you with ample operational capability at all times. It includes critical operations like sales and back-end work.
Another important thing in developing business resilience is adaptability. We can also help you in that area. Our company can quickly scale the team assigned to you as needed. Beyond that, we can handle recruitment work if you need specific talents.
Virtua Solutions also understands that building resilience is long-term work. As such, we have committed ourselves to help you all the way. Sign up with us today and get ready to turn your startup business into a stronger company for the future.