Episode Summary

Running a business isn't just about celebrating the wins; it’s about hunting down the hidden traps before they hunt you. In this episode of Getting Real with Bossy, hosts Kelly Bush and Kelly Metras pull back the curtain on risk management. They break down the critical distinctions between internal risks (the ones quietly brewing inside your own walls) and external risks (the wild cards the market throws at you that are completely out of your control).

This isn't a dry lecture on liabilities. It’s a real, raw clarity call for entrepreneurs to confront the uncomfortable truths they might be ignoring, take accountability, and segment threats into a bulletproof battle plan. Tune in to learn how to expect the worst, plan for the best, and build an enterprise that thrives in an ever-evolving business landscape.

Core Takeaways

• Look in the mirror first: Internal risks often stem from ignored vulnerabilities within your own organization. Confronting these uncomfortable truths early keeps them from blowing up later.
• Draw the line: Understand what you can control vs. what you can't. Internal threats are yours to fix; external threats require agile adaptability and a solid safety net.
• The power of ownership: Mitigating risk isn't a solo sport. Creating a comprehensive contingency plan requires clear accountability and smart delegation across your team.
• Hope is not a strategy: True business continuity means systematically prepping for unforeseen events. You have to build the infrastructure to handle worst-case scenarios smoothly.
• Audit Your Day-to-Day: Tightening and monitoring your operational processes is the fastest way to kill inefficiencies and slash operational risk.
• Watch the Money Trail: Regularly reviewing your financial health and keeping meticulous records is your absolute best defense against sudden cash flow crunches.

Episode Resources

Bossyco.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Getting Real with Bossy, the podcast that shows you what it's actually like to be a business owner.

We are your hosts, Kelly Bush and Kelly Metris.

We are so glad to have you here with us today.

This is part two of our Smart Strategies for Business Growth series.

So if you're just jumping into this, make sure you've listened to episode 86 first, or you can just follow along with us as well.

This episode does have a downloadable, so we're going to make sure you get to our website to download that and follow.

So welcome back.

We've now figured out what resources we have and where the gaps are.

And now comes the uncomfortable part.

We're going to have to look in the mirror, because not every crisis comes out of nowhere.

Some of the biggest threats to our businesses are the ones we've quietly been ignoring for months and sometimes years.

But before we can build a plan, we have to understand where risk actually comes from.

And that's where we divide everything into two buckets, internal and external risks.

And that's the focus of our episode today.

Ew.

I know we're gonna get deep down and dirty.

We are not gonna skim the surface.

If you're gonna do the work, do the work.

Yeah.

So if you're not in the mind space to do the work, you can just listen and not get the worksheet out.

If you feel like you have the time and space when it's time to break it down, don't skim the surface.

Don't be like, well, maybe the Internet will go down.

The Internet's always gonna go down, and.

It's gonna go down on a Friday.

Night or in the middle of your busiest market.

If you're a maker, Right.

Like, all of a sudden, you can't take credit card payments.

Those things.

It can be on the list, but it should be on the list.

It will be on the list, but there are other things we need to work on.

We're going to get deeper and dirtier.

Yeah, we're going to.

We're going to solve all the business problems today.

All of them.

Never an issue after today.

It is summer break, so I have no idea if you're going to be able to hear my kids or not.

So I told them all, hi, baby.

That I'm recording but in it right now.

Yeah.

So we need to be accountable.

Yes.

And the worst person to be accountable to is yourself.

If you have a team, maybe you get your team together and do this together.

Aaron, I know you're listening.

When we break it down, you can always text me and tell me to add or remove things that you think.

Should be on the list, Right?

Yeah.

So it's really hard to be accountable to yourself, Kelly.

It is.

I. I think we gaslight our own selves so often.

Yeah.

Especially as business owners, we.

It's because everything's so personal.

Right.

Like it's.

It's your small business, but it's so.

Everything is so intertwined.

Kind of like when you get that one negative review.

Right.

You can work so hard at getting that great work life balance and get all that in place.

But when it comes to being a small business owner, there's no way to get a.

Get away from the fact that this is all us, it's all personal, and there's no way to not take it that way.

And we can.

And if something breaks, it's our fault.

Yeah.

And then at the end, if it fails, it's on us, so.

But if it's successful, it's on us too.

So that's true.

Pluses and minuses.

I built this myself.

Right.

So keep that in mind that we're just trying to be the strongest and most prepared.

So again, we are.

What do we call it?

Prepper pantry.

Can't say that ten times.

Prepper pantry.

Prepper pantry.

We're hoping for the best, but we are going to expect the worst so that when.

If it happens, not when, if it happens, we're ready and maybe we find out some things that can actually improve our business today.

So.

Exactly.

So we're going to take a quick pause for you to go to our website, bossico.com and download this downloadable pause,.

Pause, pause, pause, pausing.

Welcome back.

All right, does everybody have their.

Their sheet and their trusty writing utensil?

Because I'm ready to start filling this out.

I really like writing down hard things like my to do list in colored ink because it makes it less annoying.

It's like a little bit more fun.

Right.

So I'm in like this pinkish purple.

Do you have the pens that have like the little push downs for each different color?

No, because I really like.

So I got a felt tip pen once and I've been, you know, vying for that feeling.

So my kids have these markers that have skinny ends.

Whoops, wrong.

So I use the skinny end and then I can like write things in different colors and it's just like pen thickness but not that, like, weird.

Especially those old pens.

We're getting off topic.

We'll write a.

We'll Have a list of the pens that we love to use.

Yeah.

This is not catastrophe.

This is not changing our business model.

I know, but I'm scared and I.

Don't want to do it.

I'd rather talk about pens.

So anyways, internal risks.

We made you this sheet.

We broke it down into two categories, internal and external risks.

Internal are essentially things you can fix now.

Yeah.

There are things that are happening inside your business.

They're frustrating, for sure, but in most cases, probably pretty preventable or unavoidable preventable.

So if we start, for example, with human, we've got key staff turnover, burnout, lack of training as examples.

So we do work with people.

So if you have employees, no matter how much you love each other, they have lives.

Right.

They change cities.

They have, you know, family emergencies and have to go take care of a parent.

They get pregnant, their kids get, you know, really sick or their spouse.

Right.

So, like, these things aren't personal.

They're not necessarily going to leave you because they're like, f you, I'm out.

Especially if you've built this relationship and they're managing, you know, your work and you're working closely with them.

So if you have that key person leave because they can have an emergency, they are people you're probably.

So what does that mean?

Like, what does that look, look like for you?

For me?

So, like, looking at my, you know, we have changeover in the hospitality industry more often than I would like, but it's just part of, part of the world that we're in.

And a lot of that will happen with the back of house and everything every time we get a new supervisor or manager or head.

Head, whatever you want to call it.

And you're.

If depending on how big your business is, you know, they all do things a little bit differently, but when, when they leave or they're out and then all of a sudden I can't do an order because I don't know where that stuff is kept anymore.

That's a problem.

But it happens every time we switch over.

So it's a.

For me, that's a very high Likely to happen.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's high up on the list.

Or my manager went on paternity leave, so I very quickly was like, okay, what does this look like for my business and myself?

Right.

Because I'm the person that's going to have to cover him.

And then he went early because the baby came early.

Because we're people and life happens.

Right.

So it's, it was A very stressful to say the least.

But it opens your eyes, you know, you don't want to learn these things in the moment.

But it opened my eyes to okay.

And I. I worked through it.

So now I have a plan, you know, Now I'm not scared if he's like, my kid's sick.

I'm gonna be home all week.

Like, I know how I'm gonna respond to that.

I know what it's gonna look like in my life.

I know how to alter everything.

Yeah.

We've gotten much better at making par lists so I can.

And having everything consistently put in the same fucking cooler.

Right?

I don't know.

Like, why is this gone?

So, like.

And I keep saying, like, I don't write on these things.

I don't care.

They're like, well, can we get a dry erase board?

I'm like, no, get a marker right all over it.

I don't care what these look like.

Nobody sees this.

It's in a garage.

Like, write on it what's supposed to be in here and have a par list attached so I can go in and not even know.

Like, be completely oblivious and go, okay, I have three.

That means I need six.

And that's one way that we are combating that, because it's going to continue to happen.

How about equipment and space?

We've got physical facility issues and broken machinery as examples.

Today we are in a heat advisory, and we're looking at 102.

And I'm hiding from the weather all day.

Our air conditioner at work, knock on wood, is fritzing out.

I said we should close today, but my husband is there and we are going to open.

My landlord's refusing to do anything about the air conditioner.

What's the plan if the air conditioner breaks today?

I don't know.

The plan is that we're going to close today.

Right.

But also not a great plan.

But it's the plan.

Right, but then it's a safe plan.

Right?

And then because we know that this is a possible risk, we've talked about it, we know that this is likely to happen at some point in time this summer.

We just hope it doesn't.

Um, we also have some backup plans.

They're not great for what we're gonna do.

You know, obviously day of it's gonna be closed, but how do we reopen?

It's going to stay warm out.

It's freaking July.

So knowing what that looks like so that you can act on it and you don't have to start from scratch because we have back to decision fatigue.

Like we have way too much shit, right?

This is kind of like using Google Maps.

That was the thing in the decision fatigue, right?

This is like using Google Maps so you don't have to think about it.

You're just gonna have this shit written down.

You're gonna go into detail, you're gonna plan it all out and then you're gonna put it aside.

You don't have to act on this stuff today.

I'm gonna do side note really quickly because we had a golf tournament yesterday and I was so stressed for 800 different reasons yesterday.

Cause we have a lot going on and I know how to get to that golf course.

I go there a hundred times, but I put Google Maps on so I didn't have to think about it.

And it was amazing.

And I think I started my day better.

Anyway, back to this.

So equipment, things like that space.

Our kitchen get is a kitchen is going to be 10 times hotter than it is anywhere else.

So one thing we learned last year when we had that string of really, really hot days and we just had to close the kitchen was come up with another menu that uses only like three item or three pieces of equipment.

So now it's not even a question.

We can go.

I mean, obviously sometimes we just have to close the kitchen.

Cause it's not safe for them to be in there.

But now we have a special menu that's our Heatwave menu and it's already ready to go.

It's includes everything that's already going to normally be prepped anyway.

But it only uses a couple pieces of equipment.

So it just doesn't get even hotter back there.

Or if you're like me, you have backup equipment.

So if equipment goes down, we have our.

You do.

You have a lot of storage room of, of random shit.

But when you upgrade, right, Say you make T shirts and you're using something to make the T shirts, but then you upgrade to something that can do more.

Well, you're not going to.

Don't get rid of that, right?

You're not going to sell it for anything that is going to make your money back.

Put it in storage and keep it there.

So if that machine, the new Mach machine breaks down, you know, yeah, it's going to take longer.

It's going to be a pain in the ass.

But your order can get out.

Absolutely.

Right.

Like that's a great example of planning ahead for me.

It's printers and coolers.

Yeah, it's always coolers.

It's always coolers and printers.

All right, Tech and IT server crashes, data loss software.

Hey, Kelly, let's talk data loss.

Yeah, data loss.

It's super great.

So I have this company that won't name that.

I do all of my accounting with that.

There was a breach and I lost all of my.

All of my data for Marshall street.

So that's 16 years of data gone.

And they kept assuring me that it exists somewhere, but to get it back took a very long time.

There was hacking involved.

A company came in and opened a bunch of line of credits under a fake bank account under my.

My login.

It's been a nightmare.

But now I know I need to back this stuff up and I need to be printing.

When I do my.

When I do my monthly books and I look at everything, just print, print a P and L. Just print a.

P. L. I know it's like you want to save paper.

You don't want to have to constantly buy paper.

You don't want to constantly have to change the ink.

Right.

Like, that costs money.

And it's nice to have everything on data, you know, in the cloud.

But you need to have the paper backup.

Yeah.

It's not always reliable.

You have to have that and, like, things.

Even just making sure you have a reliable hotspot.

You know, you can get that through your.

Through your company, your mobile company or whatever you're using.

But yeah, that printed stuff, it's necessary now.

I will never not do it.

And your POS goes down.

It's going to happen whether you're in the middle of a market or it's busy Friday night.

What are you going to do?

How are you going to get those credit cards?

Everybody's paying this credit.

So having that backup plan, we keep a.

It goes on your phone.

It used to plug into your phone, but now it's an app.

We just have it set up.

It has all our bank account information in it, and we can just pull it up because it happens so many times that we know we need to keep it.

I think it was up until like two years ago that we had one of those things.

Yeah.

But people got so upset about.

They were like, now you have my credit card number.

I'm like, I had it anyways.

Exactly.

So, yeah, you need to have that back up.

Okay.

Before we move on.

Hey, baby, what's up?

I have two kids in the.

In the shadows over here.

I have a question.

What's up?

Why do you have chocolate all over your face?

Because I just ate breakfast.

Like, I can answer that.

I had Nutella and jelly.

Oh, nice.

What?

Yummy.

Baby.

If you could do it without using my phone.

I love you, but we're gonna go back.

Okay.

Next, Operations and processes.

She's still glaring at me.

Bottleneck, supply chain gaps, but things that are inside your control.

For instance, not keeping track of your inventory.

So all of a sudden, you're out of fish on fish fry Friday.

I don't know why you bring that one up.

I feel targeted.

Yeah, this also works.

We were just talking about T shirts.

Taking an order without checking first to make sure you have enough on hand.

And with checking in who you're ordering with.

You know, sometimes they don't have things available, and it doesn't come as fast as you think you think it will.

One person doing a job would be another one.

So, for example, I'm the only person who does payroll.

Yeah.

I feel like paying bills is something.

I also am the only one that does, but that one's a little easier.

Yeah, scheduling's a little easier, but I'm the only person that does payroll, so.

Actually, bill pay, too.

It's all in my.

All the stuff that's online.

There's only a few things we write checks for these days.

I don't.

Hey, Erin, I hope you're real good at hacking things, but if you're not married to your business partner or somebody.

If I end up in a coma tomorrow, things are not paid.

No.

Including my employees.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think there's some level of kind of delegating approval in this.

That comes into this box as well.

You know, if you only have one person and you've got 16 people on your staff, and you're the only one that can sign a check, like, maybe it's time to just have some trusted people that can take care of that, too.

And then financial.

We love financial cash flow crunches, Unmonitored expenses, not knowing your number.

I mean, we can sign up for all the lines of credit.

We can have cash reserves when we can, but it's just.

There's nothing better than knowing your numbers and knowing that.

Right.

So, like, if you have a budget, making sure you're sticking to it.

If you.

Making sure that you're going through your books and those expenses aren't creeping in because they add up, and then you're like, wait a second.

How do I not have this money that I should have?

Right.

Or relying on one customer, because if that one customer doesn't pay.

We talked to a woman.

I think it was like, episode 30 something.

So a while ago.

And what they do is they cover those large invoices for companies because they know that a lot of times, especially if it's like a university or something like that, they're not even looking at that invoice for 30 days.

Right.

And we do a lot of catering for the universities around here.

And I consider that extra money.

I don't consider that cash flow at all because I know I don't know when that check's going to come.

Right.

I can't rely on that money.

And like I said, they don't even look at it for like 30 days.

Right, yeah.

So you can't rely on that.

All right, so we, we went through the first five.

Let's put them in order.

What do you think is your number one?

I think it's a mix between human and operational processes.

I'm going back and forth.

So is it the one I'm most scared of or the one I think is likely the most to happen?

I mean, it's chance.

I think it's the most likely to get to happen.

I am the most scared of data loss, but I don't think it's the most likely to happen.

Right.

Yeah, I think that's probably one of my lowest.

I mean, for me, it's human, then maybe financial equipment, I don't know, operations, then tech.

For me, it's equipment, human operations, financial tech.

Yeah.

And I do think for me, the amount of tech I use is way less than the average business.

So I feel like I'm lucky there.

But, yeah, you still have to.

You take credit cards, so there's always that fear of somebody stealing everybody's information.

You know, that's a PR nightmare, which will slide into other things we'll talk about.

So the next step, we're not going to bore you with our personal plans, but the next step is to put them in order and come up with a plan.

What is your plan for when each one of these things happens?

If each one of these things happens, who's responsible in making sure they know it?

Sharing that plan with your management team, if you have employees.

So say you do end up having an emergency and aren't there, whether you're in a coma or not, so they know that this is the next step and this is how to handle this situation.

And then what do you need to make sure that that's in place?

Right.

And I think going back to the person responsible, if you do have more than one person in your team, it should be more than one person in there.

And if you don't, you Know, who could that be?

Could it be your bookkeeper?

You know, are there other people that you can kind of get involved to help you not be the only one who knows how to do these things.

All right, so now we are going to talk external risk.

Yeah.

Because those internal ones aren't those dramatic movie moments.

They're those little cracks that keep coming and eventually can break your foundation.

So they're incredibly important.

But if you can get through this and take a look at these things, it really will help because the external risks are different.

These are the things that happen to your business.

You don't get to vote on whether they happen.

You only get to decide on how prepared you'll be when they do happen, because they will happen.

And this one, I feel like extra fits into the hope for the best and expect the worst.

Like, we put a lot of hope into other people doing their job right.

For our.

Still do that.

Right.

So, like this podcast, for example, it's probably.

There's no brick and mortar, you know, but Riverside could go down.

And all of our content is on Riverside.

Right, Right.

So one of the things I've been doing lately is downloading everything and putting it into a Google Drive.

But then I'm putting my confidence in Google for them not to go down.

Right.

Google, we believe in you.

You can sponsor us.

You can sponsor us.

It's like when I talked to my financial planner and I'm like, no, what's the worst case scenario?

What happens when the cloud goes down and the money disappears?

Like, what happens next?

How do I feed my kids?

Right.

So we got honeybees.

That was our answer.

So you're all set?

I'm all set.

I got honey so I can barter.

I told Baron that we're no longer allowed to do anything that's not barterable.

So if there's, you know, the entire world goes into apocalypse mode, we have things we can barter.

All right.

All right.

I needed to come move in.

See?

Yeah.

And we're feeding the groundhogs organic produce every day so that if we need to eat them in an apocalypse, we can.

And we're good friends with our neighbors.

Who has a crossbow, so you have to have these things planned.

Love it.

Let's get into the real thing.

All right, so products and services.

Yes.

Changes in demand, new competitors.

For me, I did not see 32 Mexican restaurants opening in four years.

Not even exaggerating.

That's insane.

Insane.

Yeah.

Changed everything.

I don't think anybody that is in the beverage world could have anticipated Covid making.

I mean, initially made people drink more, but now not really drink at all.

Yeah.

There's a huge shift between giving up drinking and switching to.

Cause marijuana is legal in New York State.

So that, you know, the doubling up on that really affected the beverage industry.

Whether you're selling it in a location or you're selling it to the location.

Right.

If you're a maker.

I know that there were years that markets were doing and festivals were doing really well, and then there were years that they did not.

So what happens when your best festival gets rained out or your best festival ownership changes and people don't like that person and they have a bad reputation, so people don't go.

Yeah.

I mean, people used to depend on the sales they would make from the park f fest.

And then all of a sudden, one, it was just done.

Yep.

It was a huge festival here.

Yeah.

So much money was spent.

Input markets.

I love this one because of our industry.

So this affects everybody, no matter your industry.

But, you know, we always talk about ours.

And you can cut and paste food and beverage for whatever it is that you're.

You're making.

But rising costs of goods and vendor supplies, of shortages.

My favorite is always chicken and beef.

The times.

The amount of times over the past 15 years that there was a bird flu that took out eggs.

Like, are you kidding me?

Right?

I don't have any eggs.

Or eggs suddenly go from being.

You see it at the supermarket.

At one point in time, eggs went from like $1.49 a dozen to like $8 a dozen.

And you're like, what?

Well, if you're buying those in bulk.

Right.

If you're a diner.

Yeah, I can.

I can go without eating my house.

Yeah.

Bakeries did not do well.

No.

Right now, the cost of beef, there was a. I don't know, the disease off the top of my head right now.

But there was recently a disease that wiped out beef.

And with the bird flu, they kill the chickens that are sick.

Right.

But other chickens are born, and they can have eggs in a fairly short turnaround in the grand scheme of things.

Cows.

Yeah.

They gotta grow.

They gotta grow.

So you're looking at five years at least, before the market is back to where it was.

And then people are like, what?

I remember we took off shredded beef off our menu because I would have to add, like, $7 a taco, and everyone's like, I would have paid.

No, you wouldn't have.

No, no, no, no, no, no, you wouldn't have.

You know, and now we're Looking.

And we're about to take steak off the menu.

I'm like, I can't charge.

People already complain because they think Mexican should be cheap.

I can't charge you what you're willing to pay without losing money.

Like, losing money off the go.

Just for the case of meat, we're not talking overhead and payroll and everything else that goes into it.

Just for the case of beef, I'm losing money.

Yeah, we're the same way.

We're the same way with the meats.

And I remember during the early pandemic, there was a time where we couldn't get fingerling potatoes.

I'm like, what?

Is what?

Other potatoes are fine, but fingerling potatoes are an issue.

Oh, my God.

Do you remember that boat that got stuck in the Panama Canal?

And nobody could get anything.

Like, just.

Everything just stopped.

Nothing could get through.

And we were all like, I'm sorry.

And it was.

People personally probably didn't notice as much because you're not buying quite the same amount of quantity.

You know, you might be.

You know, you walk in the store, you're like, oh, they don't have this.

And you don't think anything of it.

But for business owners, you're talking nothing.

Nothing was getting through.

Nobody saw that happening.

All right, Regulatory, political, new laws, compliance changes, tax changes.

That could be a labor law changing, minimum wage.

Coming up, licensing changes.

We say it all the time.

If your industry doesn't have a trade organization, start one on some level, even if it's just a Facebook group, Keeping up to date on this stuff is so important.

And I know that Kelly and I wouldn't be able to continue if we didn't have access to the different organizations that we're involved with that are.

That is.

Their job is to know what's going on with labor law, with things that are directly affecting our industry, because it changes so often.

And even.

I mean, this has nothing to do with regulatory and political.

But the local organizations.

So your chambers and your.

I don't even know what they're called, but your.

Your travel industry, right?

Your tourism industry, if you could be a part of that, then you know what's happening next year.

I know I don't have the capacity to think past a few months from now.

Right?

So maybe you do, but I don't.

So knowing that next, like, when the PGA came or the eclipse was happening, they started talking about the eclipse, like, three years before.

Oh, yeah.

Like, they were talking about the eclipse because so many people were gonna come to our area because we were gonna Hit it was like 98% coverage.

Right.

So, like they were prepping the area for three years when the PGA came.

They're talking about the PGA now.

I think it's 12 years from now.

It's every 10 years, but yeah, okay, yeah, 10 years.

I wasn't exaggerating that much, but yeah, it's 10 years from now.

I was like, oh, yeah, great.

I am not listening to that one because I don't know if I'm gonna be doing this in 10 years.

Right.

But yeah, knowing that these things are coming to your area also gives you time to think ahead and plan for ways to get people in.

Right.

And that's some of the fun planning.

Right.

It's not the disaster planning.

It's, oh, this is coming.

This could be a cool thing that we do.

And I think getting even, if you're not going to do the PGA kind of thinking about that, just because it's 10 years in the future and you may not want to be in business then, it still gets that creative side of your brain working, which is so necessary to have that, that balance so you're not always in panic mode.

And the way I see it, if the PGA is willing to come here, then we've got some pretty fancy golfers here already.

We do.

So how do I get them to come to my business or buy my product to go back to the negative stuff?

Tariffs, Kelly.

God, Tariffs are fun.

Tariffs.

You don't see that happening.

You always say it, that during.

Election cycles.

Yeah.

People don't spend money.

People don't.

Do not spend money for like the first half of an election year.

They just don't.

We, We've been through so many of them now.

And it's just this thing that happens every time, every, every couple of years.

And my husband's like, it's an election year.

I'm like, oh, my God, this is gross.

So stupid.

They just don't spend money.

It doesn't matter what side you're on.

Reputational, public relations issues.

We're not talking one negative review here.

We're talking a slew.

We're talking getting, you know, press coverage going.

It happens.

Sometimes people just hate you or find out you did something 20 years ago that you should be ashamed of.

Like, these things happen.

Sometimes things happen near your business.

They have nothing to do but the it.

You are the closest business to where something happened.

And your business is now just on the news non stop.

Yeah.

And people are.

Don't read.

They're not going to read the articles or they're they're pay for articles.

So you can't do it.

So they just see your business there and tragedy.

Or they have, you know, if the, something happens, the neighborhood goes downhill or something, or something tragic happens in the neighborhood and you just happen to be the shot.

Right.

Because you're, but you have a brick and mortar and like you're the shot of the day and you're like, wait, what?

That wasn't my best.

Like that wasn't me.

Right.

I had no idea.

Yeah.

So those things, those things can happen.

And how do you, how do you come back from that?

How do you mitigate?

That one's hard.

It is a hard one.

Employee misconduct, like we talked about, if you have employees, they're people, they fuck up just like us.

I remember during, especially during the early parts of the pandemic where people like well known employees would be going online and saying very controversial things and it's like, oh, you can't stop them from doing that.

You can have some policies in place for that, but what they do on their own time is their own.

But, oh, there you go.

Having a plan on how social media.

Policy, I'm going to put that in my action call, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

I mean you got to look at that.

But also have a plan on how you are going to respond publicly when those things happen.

And your plan could be don't respond for 24 hours.

It should be don't respond, but that.

Can be written down, you know, and everyone can know we do not respond for 24 hours so that we can put our shit together and figure out how we're going to approach this.

Right.

So that counts as a plan.

Right.

Natural disasters and weather, storm closures, power loss, pandemics.

You know, so funny because six years ago I would have never even thought a pandemic would be something.

Right.

Six years ago, but it is now was on the list.

Nobody could have, Nobody saw that coming.

Yeah, I mean, I saw it coming ahead of most business owners.

I know, but that's because of how many things I was involved in and that I watched the news and I pay attention to cycles and you know, we're nerdy, but I still didn't know.

I mean, maybe a week or two out I like really started paying attention.

Like, wait a second, this is a thing that I need to look at.

Right.

But still it was only.

I didn't have enough time to really react.

I mean there was, it was the level of that.

There was no way to know how to react to that.

Yeah, but you have storm closures, right?

So you have.

If you have a brick and mortar, you have snowstorms, you have flooding, you have all the heat waves.

Sometimes you have to close because it's just too damn hot.

One that doesn't necessarily fall here.

That happened to us.

I don't know where it would fall, I guess was there.

There were some riots a few years back.

And it was a combination of.

It was, like, in an adjacent neighborhood to our business.

But also, most of my employees had to go through that neighborhood to get home.

They may not live where it was happening.

And we were like, okay, like, we're gonna close.

Right?

And it was.

At first, it was like, do we really do this?

And so now there's just.

You know, this is just understood if it comes to a fact that my employees have to get home safely, whether it's snow or whether it's a riot, like, yeah, we're open.

We're fin.

Fine here.

We have to think ahead.

And now it's just a policy that we look at the.

How do.

How does everyone get home?

Right.

And if we need to close now to make sure everybody gets home safe, that's it.

So one of our policies is we are closed if the roads are closed.

So it's like, you don't even have to think about it.

If they shut down travel and they put out that warning, we're closed.

Makes it really simple for you then.

Yeah.

And you don't have to think about it.

We have another policy on weather just for staffing.

Right.

Like, we only put somebody outside.

It has to be at least 70 degrees and a 50% or less chance of rain.

And then what we realized a few years back was we all had to.

Use the same app, right?

Yeah.

Because they're all.

In the morning, my manager would be, like, texting me, and she'd be like, okay, so we're closing the patio.

And I'd be like, well, no, we're not closing the patio.

Or she'd be like, oh, we're not closing.

I'm like, but we are closing the patio.

Well, we were using different apps, so we had to agree on an app to use.

Right.

To decide those things.

But you don't know until you're in that.

In that time, in that moment.

No.

Things you learn as you go.

All right, so let's rank these.

Kelly.

Yeah, I think probably my high.

I mean, the lowest is natural disaster, because I feel like that's.

Those are fewer and far between that and reputational.

Although I do have actual plans for both of those.

Right.

I'm going from the bottom up this time.

Then political, then probably product, then input market.

That's my.

So input market would be my highest.

We're so close.

So input market, obviously, because we just talked about our specific industry and how that shit happens.

Regulatory and political would be next.

Products and services, mostly because it already had like.

My biggest thing is the change in consumer demands.

We've.

We know about the lower drinking, we know about the THC, we know about the 32 Mexican restaurants.

So we're already in the other side of that.

Doesn't mean that more things can't happen.

So that's why it's in the middle.

Yeah.

Reputational.

Have a plan.

But I think we keep a good stance on that.

But it's still there.

And then natural disasters and weather.

But I say that on a day that there's a heat advisory of 102 and I have half of an AC.

Right, but it's low for you because you have a plan in place.

Yes, it's not my plan, it's low for me.

I have a plan in place.

We know exactly what we need to do.

When it's too hot, we shut down.

When it's.

It's bearable, we have a heat wave menu.

All right, so again, put your plans get detailed deep down and dirty.

Do not skim.

Look your business in the mirror and hold yourself accountable.

If you don't, you're just giving somebody else the upper hand.

Because the people that are ready when these things happen are the people that are going to be more successful and stay open.

Right.

And I think this is such an important.

And Kelly came up with these sheets and I think they're amazing and really important because I think sometimes we have them in our head, but getting them written down are really, really, really important because then you can start to delegate and share your plan with other people.

I think sometimes those huge risks kind of just live rent free in our heads because they're so dramatic and could be so devastating to the businesses, to your business.

But that's not usually why a business fails.

One thing we didn't talk about is like fire we just recently had a local business is out because of a fire.

I don't know what their plan is.

I don'.

What they're going to turn.

You know, I've had it happen in my own space.

You know, having didn't have a plan in place, I never thought that was going to happen.

But so when you're driving on the street and you hear these things about These other businesses, hey, could that happen to me?

Yes, it could.

First of all, the answer is always yes, it could.

It's just what is the probability?

Right.

And then thinking about your plan of how you're going to do that, you need to be prepared.

And not only that, but also doing this might give you insight on how you can grow.

Now you may find things that you're not taking advantage of, that you could be doing better or differently to mitigate these things ahead of time and have a better business today.

Right.

Let's talk about your favorite person.

Oh, Mary Dowling.

Yes, your favorite.

I love her.

So Mary Dowling.

I mean, I could talk for hours.

I feel like I want you to just interview me as her one day.

Cause I'm so obsessed with her.

And she continued to run the business, which was not what was expected.

Everybody just thought she would just continue her life as a very wealthy widow and mother of eight children and continue doing things.

But she didn't.

She continued to run her business through many upsets and many setbacks because they pulled lines of credit, she lost her distributor.

All these crazy things happened.

And she's right in Bourbon county, right in Bourbon country in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.

And she ended up having.

Because she had to scrap.

And because of some of her connections, she found one up near Chicago, which was way more in tune on what was going on in the world pre Prohibition.

So she, because she was very smart and had to use resources that nobody else around her did.

She knew Prohibition was coming way before it did, so she sold off a ton of her product.

She bought several businesses that she knew would maintain through Prohibition if that became a national thing and lasted for a long time.

So when Prohibition actually started and all of her counterparts were like, what?

No drinking.

But this is what we do.

She was totally prepared and fine.

Did she get screwed over?

Yes, but that's a story for another day.

But she was totally prepared and business went on like no other thing.

She switched from her distillery to her farm and then moved on.

Yeah.

Let people call you crazy just because you're prepared for the worst.

Yeah, get your prepper pantry going and.

Worst case scenario, Prohibition doesn't happen and she makes more product.

Exactly.

And she was fine.

And she, she Diversified before diversifying was a thing.

And she wouldn't have done that if she hadn't thought it was coming.

So either way, her business was better off because she did these things right.

Growth opportunities.

So know your numbers.

Protect your people.

Audit your gaps.

Hope for the worst.

No.

Wow.

Hope for the best and expect the worst.

And drink coffee before you go on air.

Yeah.

Just be prepared.

Be prepared.

It's like a Lion King song.

Yeah, I think so.

I don't know.

That's just what's in my head.

Yep.

So be prepared.

So if you want to play the Lion King, be prepared.

While you're filling this out, maybe we.

Need to start coming up with playlists.

No, I'm not giving ourselves some more jobs.

Right.

Stop it, Kelly.

I know, I know.

I'm taking notes on a coaster, so I don't have enough room to give myself more jobs to do.

I love that so much.

Yeah.

So I saw a clip with Trevor Noah, and he said that the best thing he ever learned for his ADD was he got in the habit of saying no first, and then he could think about whether or not he wanted to do the thing.

Smart.

Because you say yes, and then you look at your calendar and you're like, fuck, now what do I do?

I just told these people I could do this.

And it's the same thing for your business, right?

You can say no first.

And sometimes saying no just means I'm gonna wait 24 hours to answer this.

That's why my email handle is my favorite thing, even though Aaron hates it, is it allows people to know I have your email.

And if I don't read it back to you in the next three hours, it's okay.

And if it's an emergency, you can contact me.

Right.

But it gives me the freedom to be able to breathe and read the email and think about it and plan for it and then give them an actual response.

Because I'll just answer.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay, cool.

Just go, go, go, go, go.

And then I'm like, shit, what do I do to myself?

I can't do this.

I don't have the capacity for this.

So, yeah.

So, Trevor Noah, if you want to come on the show and chat, it.

Could be a wonderful idea.

Right?

I love him, but, yeah, say no first.

Whatever that looks like.

It doesn't have to be the word no.

It doesn't have to be out loud.

So.

Kelly.

No.

But, yeah, playlist is a great idea.

Yeah.

Well, I think we'll just.

I'll just take notes if we if it's coming up, and then I can just add them to the show notes.

Awesome.

Yeah.

All right.

Fill the worksheet out and be bold, be brave, and be the boss.

Us.