If you are the owner of a small business and all your personal wealth (often including your family’s home) is at risk every business day, you might desperately need this process. I have a deep understanding of that desperation. Co-founding a small business in 1981, I spent the next 20 years searching for a simple, comprehensive process that could identify, prevent and reduce risks to my small company.

I found hundreds of bits and pieces of solutions scattered over dozens of sources, but always only pieces – nothing even close to resembling a process. Much of the information was created for large companies and wouldn’t scale down to practically meet the different needs of a small business. Like other entrepreneurs, I had no time to get beyond the immediate. So I did what we all do. I grabbed at pieces of solutions and patch, patch, patch in a frantic effort to avoid disaster. And, of course, be willing to fight the inevitable fires when they flare up.

As with all small companies, the fires came. We suffered several staggering risk events that nearly destroyed the company and, sadly, would likely have been prevented had we had an effective risk management process – or had my book existed then. Every fire distracted us from innovating our products and services and improving customer relationships, bleeding off our precious profits.

The good news is we learned from each fire and I believe it is fair to say that no major fire occurred twice for the same reasons. Over time our patchwork of individual risk solutions grew to cover a wide array of threats. And, at long last, the company began to prosper, providing sophisticated marketing strategy and technology to the world’s largest corporations and growing to 200 employees. Happily for two weary entrepreneurs, the company also attracted the acquisition money of a large NYSE corporation. At the sale’s closing, our Harvard Law-trained mergers & acquisition attorney stated that our risk management efforts had made us one of the most trouble free and legally clean companies he had ever seen. No doubt our low potential for risk increased our attractiveness to the acquirer.