Cases illustrating risks and crisis management

Undoubtedly, the nature of the relationships between business and risk factors in one country or another does not fit exactly into a "model" nor does it have a pure placebo effect. Yet, models' simplicity may appeal to managers and regulators in understanding important business risks and crisis related phenomena. Backed by this idea, this research underpins a comparative study on SMEs handling risk and crisis management according to a new tailored model of a balance scorecard. This new model of a risk and crisis management aims at improving both SMEs management adaptation and performance across all of crisis' stages, something not attempted so far in the literature. The application of such a 'balanced-scorecard' comes from the author's experience as a banker financing various SMEs industries, as a bank consultant on risk management as well as primarily from the results of a survey performed on a sample of 48 Romanian and Cypriot SMEs, equal-proportionally selected from the area of trading, manufacturing, and services. The results of this case study show, coincidently or not, that there is a significant improvement of the financial performance of the SMEs that employed this model compared to those that did not. The monitoring period: 11/2009-06/2010 was employed as a representative one for the latest global financial crisis which affected the entire European Union region, as well.