When winter hit and foot traffic dropped by nearly 30 percent, the owner of a neighborhood café in the Roanoke valley did the math and felt the familiar sting: payroll, rent, and supplier bills did not care about local weather or tourism cycles. They had two choices. Close shifts and hope for spring, or rework…

A delivery route disappears overnight, a key vendor stops answering, and payroll is due Friday. Contingency planning for small businesses matters because the shocks arrive without warning and take down unprepared operators. I learned this the hard way running a service business that relied on a single supplier. One regulatory change and a supplier shortfall…