In the previous step you worked on reducing the likelihood of risks happening.

Now we're going to explore how to make your agency less vulnerable to the risks.

That means taking steps now to lower the effect it would have on your agency if the risk did happen.

Identifying your weakest spots

Review the risks you've identified, and stack rank them (a uniquely-prioritised list, in which every risk is lined up above or below the others) based on how scary it'd be for you if that risk occurred.

For the purposes of explaining the approach, let's say the risk that scares you most, based on the effect it would have on your agency, is a key member of staff leaving. You've identified two that would leave you most vulnerable — your most senior account manager, and your best project manager.

If either of them left you'd be in a hole. The account manager has the strongest relationships with your biggest clients and you fear the clients would be spooked if they left. The project manager seems to hold your most important projects together by pure magic and nobody else has the full picture.

So, at the moment, your agency is very vulnerable in the face of this risk.

In the previous step you might have worked to reduce the likelihood of the risk occurring by doing good progression planning with them, 'stay interviews', professional development, and giving them really solid rewards packages and lots of appreciation.

Now you want to reduce how vulnerable your agency would be if one of them did still hand you notice.

How to reduce your agency's vulnerability to a risk