Why Your Small Business Supply Chain Can Kill Your Company And What To Do About It

A small business supply chain is fickle.

It’s held together by a thin piece of paper on the brink of entering a hurricane. At a moment’s notice, the exports of the country you buy your goods from can close, leave you with no products, and pissed off customers.

Amazon has the resources to buy chartered ships, cargo jets, and vans to zip around the world, delivering products to its mega-warehouses.

Small businesses don’t.

When times are good, a supply chain operates well, but when times are tough, borders begin to close, and conflict arises, things go to shit, fast.

The last two years have exposed how global supply chains are highly vulnerable to disruption.

So here’s where you start if you’ve thought your supply chain wasn’t worth much attention:

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I teach my sales team that they can’t have all their sales coming from a couple of large accounts.

They need to diversity because no matter how great we are, there are many areas in our customer’s operation that we can’t predict.

We must build sales account depth.

The same is true for your major suppliers.

In one of my companies, we have customers and vendors worldwide, supporting millions of part numbers for most major commercial aircraft.

We’ve had to build a preferred vendor system.

We have primary, secondary, and third-tier vendors to support our aircraft material needs.

So for you, if you’re relying on buying all your material from one primary source, get to work and…

Start contingency planning.

Imagine a situation where your primary supplier said they could no longer sell to you anymore.

Are you prepared? You should be. Building contingency plans is about seeing the worst-case scenarios and being prepared.

It’s similar to the Stoic exercise of Premeditation Malorum, in which one imagines things going…