Enterprise Risk Management for Small and Medium-Sized Companies (ERM8)

Overview

2020 taught us that major risks can come at us from any direction and with barely a warning. All organizations operate in a risk environment; however, generally only the large for-profit organizations pay a lot of attention to risk management. Or, other organizations equate risk management to insurance and completely miss some of the most important things that create and affect risk. Many years ago, led by the financial industry, large companies introduced systematic analysis in evaluating risk; however, those skills have generally failed to transfer to small and medium-sized organizations. This program seeks to do exactly that. We will explore the needs and concepts of risk management, showing how they equally affect both large and small companies as well as for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. With liberal use of case studies, we will see how companies can face the issues of risk management and systematically develop a structure to identify, evaluate, and mitigate those risks. In each area we will explore what our experiences of the pandemic have taught us about this part of risk management. It is important to note that the program is not for the experienced risk manager of the large organization, but for the finance professional dealing with a small to medium-sized company who desires to establish or refine an integrated enterprise risk management strategy.

Major Topics:

• The nature of risk in any size or type of organization
• What COVID-19 has taught us about risk management
• Risk tolerance and developing a risk plan
• Risk identification
• Risk evaluation
• Risk response
• Strategy risk
• Financial risk
• Marketing risk
• Compliance and liability risk
• Operational risk
• Environmental risk
• Cyber risk

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the concepts of enterprise risk management
• Learn more about how we could have been better prepared for the pandemic
• Determine the nature of risk in all-sized companies
• Avoid being blind to obvious risks facing the company
• Rid the company of the “silo” approach to risk
• Perform risk identifications and evaluations
• Match risk to insurance in the most economical way
• Maximize organizational profits through reduction and transfer of risks
• Understand the best approaches to cyber risk