Establishing Your Startup’s Risk Profiling Process

What is risk profiling? Many believe that risk profiling is a simple process used by advisers to determine the optimal level of investment risk a client could face in some unforeseen circumstances. Due to these reasons, most investors want to understand their risk profiles before investing. 

The primary purpose of a risk profile is to identify the potential risk capacity and tolerance to risk a client can take before meeting their investment objectives. Therefore risk profiling is of the utmost importance in the early stages of starting a business or making investments, especially if you have little to no experience assessing business risks. 

Crafting A Risk Profile 

Even though crafting a risk profile sounds complicated, it’s relatively simple. The quickest way is to fill out the questionnaire provided by your adviser and run the answers through a complex algorithm to garner insights related to your business. They can screen and assign your risk profile type. Currently, there are three significant categories of risk profiles.

• Aggressive
• Moderate
• Conservative

Creating Risk Profiles For Startups – What’s Involved?

A startup can establish its risk profile by taking an assessment provided by the adviser. After the assessment is completed, the adviser will allocate you a risk profile based on your risk tolerance. 

Suppose you’re an investor with a very low willingness and ability to take a risk. You’re instantly classified as a conservative type and suggested low-risk investment products or bank FDs. But, if you’re an investor with both a high willingness and an ability to take a risk, you’d fall into the aggressive category. That would make you a prime candidate for investment in mutual funds or something that offers direct equity and high returns. 

However, if an investor has a high willingness and a low ability to take a risk, the investor would be considered moderate. The best piece of information to our knowledge that an adviser can provide them would be to invest in mutual funds. 

Now, you might be wondering how all these things relate to establishing a startup: you have to focus on filling the risk assessment accurately, and the advisor will bring a perfect startup risk profile to the table. 

Benefits Of Risk Profiling For Startups

The benefits of risk profiling vary from business to business; the one thing you’ll always find familiar among the benefits of risk profiling is that it helps new investors plan investments that don’t go beyond their risk-taking abilities. 

So, if a worst-case scenario happens, they don’t lose everything but only a controlled fraction of an amount. 

Here are three great examples that show the benefits that a risk profile brings to early-stage startups:

1. You always take suitable operational risks as per your capital and investment dictated by your risk profile. So, you can be more relaxed as your business takes off. You wouldn’t be going overboard and losing money as your startup starts to crumble. The advisor always has a contingency plan ready for you in any case. 
2. Another great benefit that a risk profile brings to your start-up is that you’ll have many investment options that align with your goal. For example, if you’re planning to start up a software company like Microsoft. Your advisor would provide you with a software startup risk profile that would align with your current goals and requirements. 
3. The third great benefit of a risk profile in your start-up is that it would help you stay calm and composed while you go by according to your profile. You wouldn’t end up making any vast investments when things are going well, keeping your emotions away from trading decisions. 

How Can A Start-up Expand Using Risk Profiles? 

Risk profiles don’t only help you when things go sideways; they’re also a great way to expand your current company into a chain of businesses for the long term.

For example, your business model is an e-commerce concern similar to Amazon, i.e., a B2C website that caters to buyers' needs across the globe. In the beginning, the website only provided one function to its users, to connect retailers/brands to consumers digitally. With a proper risk profile, you can see Amazon’s name with many other things like Amazon Kindle, Amazon Audible, and Amazon Go. These things didn’t happen overnight; it took time and hard work to come into being. So, even if things seem a little dull initially, don’t worry!

Your business plan can take off when you have a secure understanding of your risk profile. All you have to do is put a little faith in this data and make appropriate investments according to your risk appetite. 

Conclusion 

We cannot begin to emphasize how managing cyber risk for startups and profiling are; with the market so volatile, without a proper advisor and a profile, it would be challenging to tame them, especially while starting up. Early-stage businesses can fall into the trap of thinking that they do not need a cyber security program or to manage risks, but these startups are still responsible for sensitive data entrusted to them. It’s up to cyber-aware startups to protect their business and customers by acknowledging the importance of risk management for startups and incident response plans. 

If you’re looking for risk profiling services and want to create a perfect cyber risk start-up profile, CyberSaint is here to help. For more information on how CyberBase can be of value to your startup, contact us here.