Taking risks in business is a strange, seemingly paradoxical aspect of the process. You might often hear about how important it is to put yourself out there and try courses of action that are less defined by what’s been done before, but then you also want everything that you do to be careful and supported by robust information.
Fine-tuning this to find your own level of preferred risk and reward can take a lot of work. However, there are other areas you might already be familiar with that you can turn to in order to find valuable inspiration.
Applied Thinking
Taking a look at how you might approach gambling, betting or casino games, for instance, can provide an insight into how you might approach this concept on a broader scale. If you’re someone who already visits these kinds of digital platforms regularly, you might have a certain strategy regarding how you play. When you decide to enter an online casino in New Zealand, you’re immediately going to be running risk and reward tests in your mind to determine which game you have the best chance of winning (your level of enjoyment likely also being a consideration). Once you’ve chosen your game, your confidence is going to be reflected in the size of your bet and whether or not you keep playing once you have a successful round.
Knowing when to stop is important, as is the similar idea of caution in the world of business.
The Costs of Failure
Even when the potential benefits look too good to ignore, you have to examine the possibility of failure – as well as what that might mean for your brand. In some instances, failure might only set you back momentarily, and that means that taking the risk ultimately doesn’t have too detrimental of an impact one way or the other. However, if the risk itself is costly, failing doesn’t just mean that you didn’t get the desired outcome; it also means that your business is in a much worse state than it was when you started.
This is why risks have to be calculated, so that each outcome is carefully considered and weighed against each other to determine how worthwhile it is.
The Appearance of Risk
From the perspective of your audiences, a bold new direction for your business that ends up paying off massively can have the appearance of a well-executed risk. While there likely would have been some element of risk behind it, it also might not be wholly representative of the truth.This perception of risk analyses the role that it plays in relation to your brand reputation – how it pays off to be seen as a brand that makes confident decisions that go against the grain. In reality, using your analytics to determine gaps in the market can mean that these aren’t so much risks as ventures into recently untrodden ground, but that doesn’t have to be how you present it to your audiences.
