About
Why I do this work
Des Richards is the Founder and Strategic Business Resilience Adviser at Alliance Advisory Services, helping UK business owners identify hidden risks, reduce dependency and strengthen the long-term resilience of their businesses before serious events threaten continuity, ownership or income.
Before Alliance Advisory Services, I served in the Royal Air Force. Risk, in that environment, is never something you respond to after the fact. It’s assessed before you act. You plan for what could go wrong, you understand the consequences in advance, and you make decisions with a clear head — not in the middle of the event itself. That approach has stayed with me ever since.
What changed my perspective further
Some years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I also watched my wife face the same disease, and I lost her to it.
Those experiences taught me something that no amount of professional training ever could.
You can’t always prevent serious illness or unexpected events. What you can do is prepare for the financial consequences before they happen.
Why this matters to business owners
When I moved into financial services and began advising company directors and business owners, I recognised the same pattern I’d seen everywhere else. Businesses run on the assumption that their key people will always be there — the founder, the technical director, the shareholder who put in the capital. Almost nobody has worked out, in specific financial terms, what would happen if one of them wasn’t.
That gap is what Alliance Advisory Services exists to close.
My approach with clients
I don’t lead with products, and I don’t believe in creating alarm to make a sale. I ask directors direct questions about how their business is structured, who it depends on, and what would happen — operationally and financially — if that changed tomorrow. Most of the time, those questions haven’t been asked before. Once they have been, the right course of action tends to be obvious.
The principle behind everything I advise on
You can’t always control what happens.
You can control how prepared your business is when it does.
That’s the principle behind everything I do at Alliance Advisory Services.
If you’d like to understand how resilient your own business is, I’d be happy to help.
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