“If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.” Stephen Covey. Uncertainty is the lack of information, which makes the probabilities of a defined outcome unknown. Unfortunately, running a business primarily depends on planning for a set of known outcomes. Businesses gather available present and past information to formulate a futuristic prediction. However, predictions, no matter how well-considered they are, cannot account for all variables in business. Therefore, businesses generate a set of probabilities for variable future changes and make decisions based on those probabilities. This is known as risk management. There are a lot of sources of uncertainty such as governmental regulations, disasters affecting markets, or even scientific and technological discoveries that change supply or demand. These uncertainties represent great obstacles for businesses because they might lead to poor decisions, which may result in great losses. Managing uncertain changes is tricky. When uncertainty builds, businesses must learn to adapt; otherwise they will sink. In the following paragraphs we discuss two instances where businesses have been affected by outside factors, which have created uncertainty, and how those companies adapted to continue doing business in uncertain times.
One of our team members works in the insurance industry at Campus Benefits, a private broker working in the educational market. In 2010, the 111th Congress passed healthcare legislation, the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA), known to the masses as Obamacare. First and foremost, we must understand that PPACA is a law and, as with all laws, there are penalties for non-compliance. This act has changed the way brokers do business, created uncertainty with their clients, and drastically altered the insurance industry as a whole. With a decade-long implementation plan,