Venture Lynk Risk Management
Orchestrating Enterprise Risk Management To Drive Business Value

In today's business climate characterized by disruption and volatility, companies that thrive identify the critical drivers of change affecting risk and exploit them more effectively than their peers. That said, the technologies for capturing, monitoring, and analyzing this risk data are now capable of generating a rich base of information through real-time communication and providing timely tracking of many risks. However, enterprise risks have become numerous, interrelated, complex, and damaging. Enterprise risk has continued to morph in unpredictable ways, constantly outpacing an organization's competence to anticipate them. Risks are often seen as precursive challenges to be mitigated and managed following business growth to protect against loss.

At Venture Lynk Risk Management, they believe effective risk management is an ongoing and value-creating activity. The company helps businesses gain a new perspective on risk management by viewing it as a vital performance lever that can reveal untapped opportunities to create multiple competitive advantages rather than an additional business expense.

"Our view on risk management is to advocate productive business enablement through a well-structured enterprise risk management framework, versus being a business inhibitor or solely overhead costs," states Brent Stokes, President and CEO of Venture Lynk Risk Management. “During this time of economic volatility and fears of a recession, the desperation of bad actors rises to an all-time high and so does the risk related to cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions and growth,” said Dion Davis, Senior Partner at Venture Lynk.

"With our flexibility and diversity, we can apply our knowledge and tools to any industry, especially those that are highly regulated and deal with consumer private information," adds Dion"

Venture Lynk is a full-service risk management minority owned outsourcing and consulting firm that leverages its long-standing industry expertise and front-line experience to deliver best-in-class service execution in enterprise risk management (ERM). Its team comprises industry segment leaders, retired military intelligence analysts, and enterprise-level operations executives who evaluate, manage and mitigate all types of enterprise risk. The team is assembled based on the premise that Venture Lynk's clients can utilize subject matter expertise from former industry leaders optimally and cost-effectively to create meaningful enterprise risk management solutions that enable them to grow faster.

A Team of Full-Service ERM Specialists

Venture Lynk distinguishes itself as a solution-agnostic risk management specialist. The company has many strategic partnerships with technology providers, allowing them to choose solutions that best meet users' needs while ensuring ease of implementation. Unlike SaaS risk or vendor management platforms, where clients must first commit and then engage in a pay up front subscription-based model, Venture Lynk’s ERM strategies are custom-tailored as a total or component-based solution that can be activated without subscriptions and up-front cost.

They can be seamlessly implemented across the organization or specific risk domains and third-party vendor relationships. This enables it to integrate and support enterprises of all sizes regardless of industry vertical, from proof of concept to value creation.

"We offer services that continuously monitor and measure risks on an ongoing basis, instead of undertaking the process on an annualized or quarterly basis," explains Dion Davis.

Venture Lynk helps its organizational leaders develop a robust ERM strategy and real oversight to monitor the enterprise's current and future information security and operational risks with maximum visibility across every risk data point and facilitate them to make proactive risk-associated decisions. The team at Venture Lynk helps its clients achieve a maximum possible defensible position so as to avoid the possibility of risk events and incidents occurring due to negligence or improper resource allocation. The company solutions identify risk factors and utilizes active cyber and financial security monitoring which enables clients to constantly update their security stack and avoid costly supply chain disruptions.. Following a 'trust but verify' approach, Venture Lynk can extend its capabilities to continuously monitor third-party vendors up to the nth vendor. According to studies conducted by the Poneman Institute in 2018, hackers cost an organization an average of $607,745 per risk incident and at least 61% of data breaches start at the third-party vendor level. Venture Lynk’s experienced information and cyber security analysts, composed of retired military intelligence personnel, identify gaps, vulnerabilities, and inadequacies that vendor questionnaires—often performed by AI applications—consistently fail to uncover.

Our view on risk management is to advocate effective business enablement through a well-structured enterprise risk management framework versus being a business inhibitor or solely overhead costs," says Brent Stokes, President and CEO of Venture Lynk Risk Management

Venture Lynk's seasoned team effectively performs comprehensive information security and financial health risk assessments of vendor profiles when onboarding new or evaluating existing ones, allowing clients to focus on business growth by reducing time and resources spent on key vendor management functions. Beyond solution implementation and active risk monitoring, Venture Lynk offers training regarding the solutions in place and enables users to leverage the relevant best-industry practices effectively.

As startups accelerate their journey toward success, a significant amount of proprietary information, processes, and data are created. Venture Lynk has partnered with top intellectual property attorneys and experts in the country to offer a complete solution for intellectual property protection and risk management. Its IP legal team helps clients ensure the identification, protection assessment, and strategy for preservation of intellectual properties and enterprise-wide policy and practice.

In addition, Venture Lynk creates an information security charter, implements, and co-manages with the client an information security steering committee that deploys proposed information security policies to provide maximum confidence in ensuring a client's business sustainability. It also develops strategic plans to help clients prepare for and pass a SOC II audit.

"With our flexibility and diversity, we can apply our knowledge and tools to any industry, especially those that are highly regulated and deal with sensitive data such as consumer private information," adds Davis.

"We lead with our in-depth industry knowledge, and ability to provide immediate enterprise risk management capacity or additional capacity to your enterprise regardless of its size and complex business structure," elucidates Brent"

Venture Lynk's scale, agility, and extensive industry insights have helped it garner a clientele of prominent brands in North America. The company has been developing tailor-made solutions that have helped clients navigate through complex ERM challenges. One of Venture Lynk's clients, a banking firm, is using the company's full service to enable its processes, from identifying and analyzing operational risk to conducting custom end to end vendor risk management functions. In the past, the banking firm had limited resources and sought help from an outside vendor management program for key risk management functions, such as annual information security and financial health risk assessments. Venture Lynk was tasked to come in and carry out those particular services while continuing to add other ERM services as the financial institution grew. However, as the client's vendor ecosystem grew, especially during the onset of COVID, they needed to onboard more vendors to support the increased workload across the enterprise. Venture Lynk stood by the banking firm and continued to support its growth, making necessary adjustments that suited its vendor management program to enable the business to successfully accommodate and scale.

Using Risk Management as a Source of Strategic Advantage

For any company, whether a startup or an established firm, to ensure consistent growth and the highest possible value at the time of a new investment or sale, it is imperative that they continually monitor and maximize control over risk at an enterprise level. Venture Lynk was established as a modern, full-service risk management solutions provider that offers risk or vendor management system agnostic solutions to help constantly innovating companies fully optimize and scale alongside their evolving vision.

"We lead with our in-depth industry knowledge and ability to provide immediate enterprise risk management or additional capacity to your enterprise, regardless of its size and complex business structure," elucidates Stokes.

Venture Lynk played an integral role during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its flexible network model, core team of specialists, and vendor management capabilities in the financial and real-estate industry have helped it build trust, open new avenues with its clients, and diversify to industries such as healthcare, public utilities, government, manufacturing, and distribution. If art and science constitute two tenets within effective risk management, with customer needs and expectations as a driving force, Venture Lynk is the perfect choice for a trusted partner in the risk management space with its immense value propositions.