New Uses for Risk Experts

TRACKING PURCHASE PATTERNS

Given retailers’ razor-thin profit margins, risk experts can help them do everything from anticipating dips in the economy that could affect discretionary spending to keeping supply chains efficient. TeliApp CEO Joshua Weiss hired a risk analyst after realizing that his social creative agency and software service company could help its retail clients examine purchasing patterns. Once they do, explains Weiss, these clients— including Walmart and Barnes & Noble—can decide what types of inventory to stock up on, and if they’re wrong, how much that will cost them and whether they can afford that loss.

POLITICAL RISK

Many fast-growing technology companies bump up against life-or-death regulatory issues, prompting them to hire political risk experts to help them determine what calculated risks are worth taking. Bradley Tusk, the founder of New York City–based political strategy and venture firm Tusk Ventures (and an Inc.com columnist), has carved a name for himself helping startups like Uber and FanDuel do just that. Recently, he worked with the marijuana-delivery app Eaze to expand its business across California, persuading the founders not to pursue smaller towns. “The legal effort would have been just as much as it was for a big market, and the reward wasn’t proportional to the risk,” he says.

ENHANCING CYBERSECURITY

With breaches affecting such corporate giants as Yahoo, Sony, and Equifax, businesses are increasingly looking to security analysts to model the likelihood of future hacks. After Mindbody was the victim of a cyberattack in 2011—bringing the cloud software company’s services down for four days—CEO Rick Stollmeyer hired a new chief information officer, a new head of security, and, most recently, several risk analysts who could evaluate the probability of a future attack and whether it was worth investing in more security. Says Stollmeyer: “We got a lot smarter, very fast.”