The best defense can sometimes be a great offense: benefits of retaining financial advisors before the onset of a crisis.(selected topic)

Your nose is running, your throat is a little scratchy and you feel the signs of a slight fever. In response, your first instinct is to treat it yourself. Why go to a doctor? All he or she is going to do is tell you to get some rest, take an aspirin and come back in if it gets worse. Why would you spend your hard-earned money for that kind of predictable advice? Of course your assumption is that these are simply the symptoms of a cold or flu. But what if the situation is more serious than that? By the time you realize you have misdiagnosed the disease, it may have evolved into something far more serious and expensive to treat. Your 20/20 hindsight would tell you, had you gone to a professional earlier, you might have saved yourself all the additional agony and expense.

Many business owners or operators take the same approach with their company's financial health. Competition is putting a squeeze on margins, overhead is increasing year-on-year, and these costs cannot easily be passed on to their customers. The answer: self diagnosis and treatment. The business answer to aspirin is to arbitrarily cut expenses by some percentage. When that does not stand the test of time, they simply take more aspirin and cut expenses again. There is an old saying, "You can't save your way to long-term profitability." Unfortunately that is all too often the approach taken.

This article suggests a different approach by explaining the benefits of bringing in professional advisors before the disease spreads to the point where it cannot be treated. This will require a radical paradigm shift from more conventional thinking.

Whether it concerns health, a natural disaster or a financial crisis, one thing is certain--the more time you have, the better the outcome. With lead-time comes options and with options come much needed flexibility. Health professionals know that great health is not the absence of disease, but rather the presence of a strong immune system.

Financial advisors live in this setting constantly and can discern the early warning conditions that signal potentially dangerous situations that may lead to dramatic erosion of enterprise value or possibly even a question of survival.

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Why is bringing in advisors prior to a crisis the exception?