1. Overreliance on Key Clients

Many growing companies owe their early success to one or two major clients. It feels flattering and it feels safe. The problem is that a single budget reduction, a leadership change, or a procurement freeze can wipe out a large portion of revenue overnight.

This risk does not only affect income. It influences hiring decisions, planning, forecasting, investment confidence and even team morale.

Leaders do not need complex models here, they need awareness & clarity.
• What percentage of revenue comes from the top three clients?
• Would the business survive the sudden loss of one of them?

A real-world example of this can be seen in 2017, where advertising firm WPP suffered a sharp drop in its share price and profit warnings after major client Unilever cut its spending, exposing WPP’s overreliance on a small number of major clients for revenue.

2. Inadequate IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Many SMEs assume their systems will continue working without interruption. This holds true until something fails. A misconfiguration, an IT provider mishap, a cloud outage, a lost device or a targeted cyber incident can shut down service delivery, invoicing or customer support for days.

Leaders do not need the technical scripts. They do need to know:
• Does a recovery plan exist?
• Who owns it? Do you need to check with your internal IT team?
• How long it would take to restore operations if everything stopped today?

Downtime hurts revenue. Slow recovery hurts credibility.

In 2017, British Airways experienced a catastrophic IT failure due to an inadequate disaster recovery plan, leading to 75,000 flight cancellations and costing the airline $68 million in compensation and legal fees.

3. Skills Gaps or Shortages

Businesses often grow faster than their talent base can support. Critical skills can end up concentrated in a handful of people, or not be present at all. These could be new skills, like AI, or other technical skills that are required for the job. And when one person leaves, falls ill or is poached, projects stall and delivery slows.

Skills gaps show up through missed deadlines, rising recruitment costs, falling service quality, and teams feeling stretched. Leaders do not need complex workforce plans. They need to know which roles the business cannot currently afford to lose, and where skills gaps exist.

What to think about:

• What skills do we require to meet our clients & customers demands?
• Which roles are single-person dependencies now?
• Is there a backup or skills-building plan in place?
• Could we upskill current staff and/or do we need to hire new staff?

In 2025, PwC publicly stated that it was struggling to hire enough technologists, with senior leaders admitting they needed “hundreds and hundreds” of engineers but could not find the talent, slowing down major digital and AI transformation plans across the firm.

4. Changing a Core Product

Altering a flagship product (ie not launching a parallel product) is one of the most underestimated risks. It is not just a design or cost decision. It is an emotional one. Customers build trust around the products they buy repeatedly. Changing that product can trigger frustration and backlash.

A Classic (pun intended) example was Coca-Cola changing the formula for its flagship Coca-Cola product in 1985. Even with 200,000 taste tests 'confirming' people would prefer 'New Coke', it failed, fast - with an immediate backlash from consumers, and 79 days later the old recipe was brought back.

A personal example of this was Kellogg's in South Africa changing the recipe for Strawberry Pops. I hadn't had Strawberry Pops for years, but then saw it on the shelves one day, and ended up buying a box. I was so looking forward to that same wonderful taste at breakfast the next morning, only to be greeted with a taste that was not only disappointingly different to what I remembered, but barely palatable to me at all. I ended up checking on Reddit to see if it was just me and, thankfully, I wasn't the only one; there was even a petition to change the recipe back!

Before changing a core product, leaders should ask some simple questions:

• Should we launch a parallel product, instead of risking anything with our core product?
• Have we tested the idea with the people who care most?
• Is this change genuinely an improvement for customers or just cost-driven?

5. Spearphishing of a Senior Employee

Cyber criminals often target individuals instead of systems. Senior employees are prime targets because they are trusted, busy and often under pressure. Attackers impersonate executives with surprising accuracy and use this to request payments, data or access.

Spearphishing campaigns now impersonate CEOs, founders, and CFOs with surprising accuracy.
One convincing email or request can lead to:

• Fraudulent payments
• Leaked data
• Unauthorised access
• Reputational damage

A simple rule avoids most of the damage. No financial or sensitive action should be taken without a verification step. A short confirmation call is worth far more than the cost of a breach.

In 2016, FACC, an Austrian aerospace parts supplier, lost approximately €50 million after cybercriminals impersonated the CEO in a spear-phishing attack, tricking an employee into transferring funds - the CEO and CFO were later dismissed following the incident

6. Bonus Risk: Inadequate Risk Tracking

Most risks do not become dangerous because they exist. They become dangerous because no one is watching them. They live in assumptions, email threads, old spreadsheets, meeting notes and the back of a leader's mind. That is where they quietly grow into significant problems.

Without a central place to track risks, early warnings disappear. Ownership becomes unclear. Mitigations slip. Decision making happens without the full picture.

A business doesn’t need a complex governance system to stay ahead.
It needs a simple way to:

• See its risks
• Assign ownership
• Review them regularly
• Spot early warning signs

This is why Risknado was built.