Risk Management in Small-medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: A14, University of Wolverhampton, language: English, abstract: This paper is proposing to research the influence of risk management on the financial performance of small-medium-sized enterprise (SME) in West Midlands, UK. SMEs expose many risks in their ordinary course of business, such as interest rate risk and foreign exchange risk, natural disasters and so on, that could minimize their profit by increasing their financial loss. This paper shows that how could SMEs reduce its financial loss from risk exposure by having proper risk management tools in place, by interviewing the SMEs' risk managers. The interview generally focuses on the risk management process in SMEs accompany with their annual spending on it, and examines how these risk managements in company are used to overcome the risks. In addition, different perspectives on the impacts of the risk management to company’s financial performance, research methodology, research limitations, and research timescale are discussed and presented.