The pandemic should have reminded people of a lesson – A superefficient dominant model elevates the risk of catastrophic failure.

What does that mean? Basically – the more efficient you make your business, the more fragile it becomes.

The opposite of efficiency is resiliency. Resilient businesses feature redundancy and slack and diversity, which… are not efficient.

There are two areas where this has been highlighted recently – disruptions to the global supply chain and the outage of all Facebook platforms.

FacebookDown

Facebook has been down before. So has Instagram, and WhatsApp. It’s one thing to use these channels to promote your products and services. It’s another thing to run your business in a way that if Facebook goes down you don’t have a business.

Facebook channels may be the most efficient way to promote your goods and services and to communicate with customers, but the more concentrated and efficient you are, the more risk there is of a large failure.

In this case, resilience has always been owned media. Your brand. Your website. Your content. Your email list. Your call-centre. Your community.

It’s not just Facebook. If your entire business is piggy-backing on systems built by others – like Amazon and Ali Baba. Then be aware: your business is at risk. Which brings us to the supply chain.

The Efficiency of the Market

Whether it be a lack of lorry drivers in the UK caused by Brexit, or port restrictions in California caused by the pandemic, or just a ship running aground in the Suez canal – the hyperefficient supply chain is fragile.

The most efficient Ecommerce model is drop-shipping. No stock, no means of production, no real value add.

Here’s an unpopular thought. Maybe the supply chain problems are good for the market – to weed out all the get rich quick ponze schemes masquerading as ecommerce businesses.

Maybe, the so-called ecommerce businesses that merely source product from China, import it and mark it up without adding any value should fail.

Of course there are some consumers caught in the middle of that argument, but maybe they need to understand the con.

So what’s the point of this rant? Have a resiliency strategy. Invest in your owned media and assets.