Brutal Investments: Financial Contingency Planning for Businesses.

Pound for pound, Mike Tyson was the best male boxer to have ever taken the professional ring. The bloke had good muscle density, cardiovascular fitness, lightning speed in his punches, and just this real toxic male bravado, that unfortunately got him into a lot of steep within his personal life (did him well though in the boxing ring).

Managing investments feels like being in a boxing ring, where you're constantly contending against the variables you can control (your physical fitness, diet, sleep, etc.) and those you can't (inflation, cost of living crisis, austerity, bear-sticking markets, etc.). Like a good professional boxer, keeping a good track on all that you can control requires somewhat of a daily strength and conditioning. The discipline required to follow through with good long-term decisions (such as to practice saving cash for a contingency fund, of which the unforeseen event may only happen a year from now), within this high-pressure, high interest rate environment, requires a similar aggression as these athletes have.

For businesses, the budget planning component of any contingency plan is crucial to ensure long-term survival through business-critical events, or quite frankly catastrophes, such as this potentially corrosive monkey-pox pandemic. Executed with effectiveness (good factoring of all potential threat variables) and efficiency (no excess or deficit amounts of money to be spent, and enough liquidity accessible in cash reserves), this long-term plan can be a thing of beauty.

Just that in the short-term, ridiculously increased costs such as six key industrial metals on the London Stock Exchange by double in 2021; spot-natural gas prices by six times in Europe than the pre-pandemic times; and global maritime container freight rates costing seven times higher than in 2019 (McKinsey & Co.), make it very difficult for any business to think about the long haul. It becomes a priority for them to rather improve their business model, in order to capture more sales and reduce costs, in a way that can, say, allow for the "luxury" of contingency planning.