Teabags and toilet paper, two essentials most households buy every week.

They're must haves not nice to haves, now look at your business offering, is it essential or a non-essential nice to have?

That's not to say discretionary purchases stop during financial downturns, but fighting for a share of tightening budgets is stressful. Business wants will struggle when compared to business needs, like compliance, regulatory, legal and other business essentials.

Over the years I've worked on reducing risk in my businesses, after my first went pop because of having one customer account for 90 per cent of turnover. They had a cashflow issue, which meant we had a cashflow issue. Lesson one, don't have one customer that accounts for more than 25 per cent of your turnover.

Lesson two, avoid having more than 25 per cent of your customers in one sector, industry or locale. I learned that one during the credit crunch when the majority of my customers were in finance, banking or the leisure sector and that was goodbye business number two.

Lesson three, if a customer doesn't understand your value, then you have none. That ended business three, too technical, requiring too much explanation during sales and subsequent meetings; business owners didn't fully understand what we did.

With various iterations and tweaks we've reduced the complexity in the business, and now offer a service with value that is completely apparent, Web Hosting powered by renewables. One product, three variations, depending on size of business, with upsells.

Having a subscription service that builds each month, providing businesses a service that's not optional is proving a winning strategy. It also means cash flows more readily and is unlikely to stop if the economy, a sector or a customer hits a downturn.

What are you doing in your business to reduce the risk of the predicted economic slow-down?

By Stuart Morrison