How to prepare your business for the unexpected 

“Prepare for the unexpected”. It’s a mantra that looms heavily over business owners. They know things will go wrong. It’s a matter of when, not if. But is there a way to prepare for the worst? After all, the saying itself is almost a paradox: How do you prepare for what you can’t expect? 

The key to unlocking this conundrum is semantic: “Unexpected” doesn’t necessarily mean “unforeseeable”. Unexpected concerns when something occurs. Unforeseeable concerns what it is.

By considering the hypothetical “what,” you can prepare your business for unexpected events, so it can be more resilient to start with, and bounce back quicker if the worst happens.

The understand > weigh > plan framework 

• Understand: Pick an area of your business and ask yourself “what if…?” Then work out what would make that risk real: Why it could happen, and what it would affect. For example: What if your best-seller stops selling?
• Weigh: Examine the parts of your business that the risk would touch. Gather the relevant data, and ask honest questions about how exposed you are and how well you’d cope.
• Plan: Build a plan to stop your “what if” from becoming a real issue. This may involve immediate action, new measures, or contingency plans in case the worst happens.

Let’s demonstrate this framework by asking some “what-ifs” that can affect most businesses across three key areas.

1. Cash flow

Cash flow is the money moving through your business at any given time. Without a constant flow of money, things get very difficult, very quickly. It’s important to note that cash flow can become an issue regardless of profit margins or sales volume. Many healthy businesses, with a strong customer base and a good number of sales, have run aground for lack of cash in the bank. Let’s look at a couple of “what-ifs” around cash flow, starting with the example we gave above.

What if your best-seller stops selling?

Understand

Is your stock still worth something? Almost certainly. But can you always turn it back into cash on short notice? Maybe not. And if most of your money is tied up in one product, your cash flow might rely heavily (too heavily) on that product continuing to sell.

Remember that nothing inside your business needs to change for a best-seller to stall. Shifting habits, changing tastes, and competitor activity can all slow sales.

Weigh

To understand whether this is likely to become an issue (or already has been, without you realizing), gather the data you already have:

• Sales data — to see what’s actually selling, and how quickly.
• Stock held — to show how much money is tied up in inventory. If you don’t have this, you can get it by manually counting what’s in your warehouse.
• Upcoming debts or orders — perhaps some of your stock is on buy-now-pay-later, or you need to place a big order to meet a supplier’s minimum.

Does the empirical data back up the idea that you’re too reliant on one product? If the sales of that product halved next month, would the rest of your range keep enough money flowing to stop business from stalling? And are you committed to orders you’ll have to pay for regardless?

Plan

If one product dominates your warehouse today, don’t worry. That’s why we’re using this framework. You can make changes now that will help. 

• Diversify your product holdings – research products that would appeal to your customers based on what sells now. Advertise these products heavily on the pages of your best-sellers as recommended items to ensure maximum reach.
• Spread the risk in future orders – you can keep more stock of a best-seller without relying too heavily on it.
• Review your stock levels frequently – regular checks will show you when something isn’t selling fast enough, before it becomes a problem.
• Have a markdown strategy ready – decide in advance what you’ll do when stock stops moving. Marking down slow-moving products quickly turns them back into cash you can spend on something that sells faster. It isn’t immediately obvious, but slow-moving stock costs you more than its price tag, because it ties up money that could be driving growth elsewhere.

Even if your stock is diverse enough, it’s still worth clearing out poorly performing stock from time to time to turn it back to cash. If the game is turning stock to cash to stock to cash, the more times you can do this in any given window, the better. Fast-selling items always trump slow-moving things. 

You can learn the patterns over time. Some products may perform better at certain times of the year (cue Homer Simpson selling his pumpkin shares before Halloween). But you get the point.

What if a big bill lands and the cash isn’t there?

Understand

Cash can run short even when sales are fine. Money your customers spend can take time to reach your bank, and weekends, public holidays, or a brief dip in sales can all cause a shortfall in your cash flow. And if one of these things happens just as you need to place an order, or pay an unexpected bill, you might find yourself in a difficult situation.

Weigh

Monitor your bank balance over a period of a few weeks. Go back through statements, paying careful attention to differences in busy versus quiet quarters.

Cross-reference your findings with your current situation, including upcoming debts and orders, then ask yourself: If an unexpected bill arrived during a slow week, could you pay it? Do you have personal finances, credit, or a rainy-day fund to fall back on?

Plan

If the honest answer is “no” or “only just”, it’s worth putting a contingency in place:

• Set up a savings pot – there’s no need to go mad. Schedule your bank to set aside a small amount each day ($5-$10 is a good starting point), and round up transactions if your bank allows it. Spooning a little off the top is an easy way to build a small reserve.
• Look into potential lenders – it doesn’t take long to get an agreement in principle for a loan, and it often costs nothing. Your business might not qualify, but it’s better to find that out now than in an emergency.
• Manual payouts – processors like Stripe usually allow you to pay out when you need to for a small fee (usually around 1%). It’s not a habit you want to get into because that’s literally them taking your profit from you for money that’s yours. But it can be a blessing in a shortfall. 
• Know your last resort – you can use a personal credit card to fund your business in a pinch, but you’re personally liable for that debt, and interest can add up quickly.

2. Physical processes

Physical processes are the literal moving parts of your business: Putting orders together, taking in deliveries, and managing the people who do the work. Moving parts can usually be honed, and by understanding them clearly, you can foresee issues before they happen.

What if mistakes start creeping in as your team grows?

Understand

Growth is good news, but it puts pressure on processes built for a smaller team. More people means more handovers and more room for things to go wrong. 

Errors can happen in almost any area, but it’s perhaps easiest to conceptualize this in an e-commerce business where an incorrect postage label, wrong items sent, or orders missed altogether. Issues can arise from a lack of training, a poor fit for a role, or even low motivation.

Mistakes like these may seem relatively small, but even small errors lead to returns and unhappy customers. There is also another rather important consideration. If you aren’t keeping up with training, or haven’t updated your liability insurance, the repercussions may be more than just inconvenient. You could end up with a lawsuit on your hands if the worst happens.

Weigh

Because this risk is so closely tied to your employees, start by sitting down with them. They’ll often see problems long before they show up in your numbers. Then ask yourself:

• What did your sit-downs uncover? Note any recurring frustrations or problems your team raised. These will be useful in the “Plan” stage.
• Are errors actually up since your growth? Look for signs of declining performance, and consider whether any are on the horizon as you keep growing.
• Is your training up to date? This keeps your staff safe and makes sure gaps in training don’t leave your business open to legal claims.
• Is your liability insurance up to date? Check that it covers your current number of staff and any new risks that have developed since you last reviewed it.

If you’ve fallen behind on training or insurance, deal with that as a priority. But fixing what’s already wrong is only half the job. Preparing for the unexpected means guarding against things that haven’t happened yet, and there’s likely plenty more to look at than the immediate issues.

Plan

If issues are creeping in, or you can see them coming, consider:

• Regular check-ins – a weekly meeting where employees feel comfortable raising issues. Imagine thinking an uptick in order errors is because of poor staff training, when it’s actually that a broken label printer has forced staff to hand-write labels. Communication is key for keeping everything operating at its peak. 
• Hands-on product familiarity – restaurants let their chefs taste the food so they know what it should taste like. In the same way, giving employees hands-on experience with your products helps them become familiar with what’s being ordered. This might be particularly useful if you have many similarly named products that are easily confused.
• A buddy system – having new starters shadow an experienced colleague on their first day gets them off on the right foot and catches training gaps early.

3. Customer experience

Anticipating and preventing customer experience issues is more qualitative than assessing something like cash flow. It’s also less templateable because it varies so much from business to business.

It can also be more insidious, that is, harder to determine the exact damage it’s doing to your business. For example, a bad experience could lead to a bad review that’s read by an unknowable number of people. These days, it could even influence how AI LLMs are talking about your business. 

Returning customers are essential for success. Without them, you’d need a startup-level marketing budget just to stand still, three years into your business.

What if customers buy once and never come back?

Understand

Customers rarely tell you they’re leaving. They just don’t return. Often the cause is something small that went wrong once, like a missed email, a curt reply to a complaint, or a returns process that didn’t work the way they expected. Because nobody raises it directly, the problem can go unnoticed for a long time.

Weigh

Look at the evidence you already have:

• Customer churn data – what share of your customers buy more than once? If most only purchase once, there’s more you can do to build confidence in your business.
• Customer support – does your business tend to miss emails, strike the wrong tone when replying to complaints, or apply its returns policy inconsistently? You might be surprised what you find here.

Then ask yourself: If a customer had a problem with their first order, how confident are you that it would be handled well enough to bring them back?

Plan

If repeat purchases are low, or your support has gaps:

• Set a target response time for complaints – decide how quickly emails should be answered, and check that it’s being met.
• Agree how complaints are handled – a shared approach to tone and resolution means every customer gets the same experience, whoever replies. Preparing templates might help you ensure uniformity.
• Make your returns policy clear and consistent – ensure it’s written down, easy to find, and applied the same way every time. Also, ensure your site has clear FAQ and Terms and Conditions pages. These are not only good for practical reasons, but they also send out the right signals for SEO.
• Keep an eye on your churn data – checking it regularly shows you whether changes are working, and warns you early if things start to slip.

You might want to take a more active role in curating a brand image as well. Buoyant social media profiles, claiming any review pages customers have made (and monitoring them), all contribute to a rounded brand image. People won’t always come to your site directly. They’ll see what others are saying. Which brings us nicely to the final point.

What if you find bad reviews you didn’t know about?

Understand

Customers will talk about your business whether or not you give them a place to do it. On some review sites, a page for your business can be created as soon as someone leaves a review, so a profile may exist that you never set up. Negative reviews there shape how new customers see you, even if you’ve never read them.

Weigh

If you haven’t already searched for your own business, now’s the time to see what people are saying. If you find reviews on a profile you don’t control, ask yourself:

• How much damage are they realistically doing? A handful of bad reviews matters less if you already have thousands of positive ones elsewhere. But if your business has a two-star Trustpilot because two disgruntled customers left negative reviews, Google has a tendency to prioritize this in results, meaning it could be one of the top links about your business. 
• Are they actually about your business? Reviewers sometimes confuse businesses with similar names. If you can, check that the reviews were from real customers. If they weren’t, contact the review site. Sometimes they will remove incorrectly attributed reviews, especially if your company has a similarly named competitor.
• Is there any merit to the criticism? The reviews may highlight a problem you weren’t aware of.

Once again, with the immediate issues resolved, it’s time to stop any future problems from occurring in this area.

Plan

Once again, much of this comes back to curating a brand image yourself.

• Set up or claim an official review profile – you might worry that this invites more negative reviews, but people are already talking about you. Having an official profile means you’re part of the conversation instead of finding out about it later.
• Consider taking on the negative review profile (if one exists) – rather than setting up a parallel one. Setting up a new one won’t stop people from finding the negative one, but taking it over will, over time, dilute the negative reviews, which may prove to be more beneficial than leaving a negative profile.
• Respond to bad reviews – a thoughtful reply that puts things right can change the outcome, both for that customer and for everyone reading. If you can, drop the customer a friendly email. It sounds like a hack, but the human touch can genuinely get people to reconsider negative comments.
• Report reviews that aren’t genuine — for mistaken identity or false claims, raise it with the site, but don’t rely on them being removed.
• Learn from fair criticism — if a complaint has merit, fix the underlying problem. If you’ve already dealt with it, file it under learning curve.
• Maintain it, always — the moment you take your eye off the ball, things can go backward. It takes surprisingly few negative reviews to change the AI summary Trustpilot now posts on every profile. Make sure email alerts are turned on.

Even if you’ve never had a bad review, getting good ones doesn’t hurt. Remember: People say bad things because they want to. People only say good things if they think you want them to.

Encouraging customers to leave positive reviews at every opportunity (without becoming annoying) is probably the only way to build a profile. It can be a slog, but it comes with the added bonus that every good one will brighten your day a little.

Stay ahead of the curve

The questions we’ve explored are really just to inspire you to ask more questions, and then apply the Understand > Weigh > Plan framework. There are also low-cost tools that use AI to help curate your brand image via multiple social platforms and manage your reputation. Bring them into your “Weigh” process to take some of the stress out of the research element.

Keep understanding, weighing, and planning, because you can’t know when, but you can know (roughly) what.  

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between “unexpected” and “unforeseeable”?

“Unexpected” is about when something happens, and “unforeseeable” is about what happens. You can’t predict the timing of most problems, but you can usually anticipate what kinds of problems might hit your business and prepare for them in advance.

What is the Understand > Weigh > Plan framework?

It’s a simple way to prepare for risks before they happen. First, pick an area of your business and ask “what if…?” to understand the risk. Next, weigh your exposure using the data you already have. Finally, plan the actions, measures, or contingencies to prevent the risk from becoming a real problem.

Can a profitable business still run into cash flow problems?

Yes. Cash flow is about the money available at any given moment, not profit. A business with strong sales can still struggle if too much cash is tied up in stock, or if a big bill arrives before customer payments reach the bank.

How can I build a cash buffer without a big upfront investment?

Start small. Schedule your bank to save a modest amount each day, round up transactions if your bank offers it, and get a loan agreement in principle before you need one. That way you’ll know your options before an emergency.

What should I do if I find negative reviews on a profile I didn’t set up?

First, check whether the reviews are genuine and actually about your business. Then think about claiming the profile instead of starting a new one, respond thoughtfully to fair criticism, and report any reviews that are false or meant for another business.

How often should I revisit my business risks?

Regularly. Things like stock levels, churn data, and review profiles can shift quickly, and small problems are much easier to fix when you catch them early. Treat Understand > Weigh > Plan as an ongoing habit, not a one-off exercise.