Dr. Jeff Donaldson, CD
424 episodes listed below
Preparedness for businesses that cannot afford chaos.
Mastering Risk is a blunt, practical guide to keeping small businesses operating when systems fail, suppliers wobble, or money gets tight. Dr. D frames risk as daily operational work, not abstract fear, with episodes built around checklists, examples, and owner-level decisions.
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Mastering Risk is built for the part of business ownership that rarely fits into optimistic startup advice. Systems break. Suppliers fail. Accounts get locked. Cash gets thin. Dr. D uses those ordinary but serious problems as the starting point for episodes about survival, continuity, and resilience. The show spends a lot of time with small and medium businesses because their risks are often immediate and personal: one outage, one hack, one supplier failure, or one bad assumption can stop the whole operation. Its strongest episodes turn that vulnerability into practical work. A three-day shutdown becomes a lesson in coordination, not panic. A compromised Apple ID becomes an example of why single points of failure matter. A discussion of preparedness mistakes becomes a checklist covering business continuity, cybersecurity training, cash flow, suppliers, backups, data redundancy, and insurance. The show is direct. It does not flatter entrepreneurs with easy promises. Instead, it keeps returning to control, discipline, logistics, and the unglamorous systems that let a company keep moving. Dr. D also talks about side hustles, incorporation, naming, domains, bank fees, trust, online presence, and the honest scale of a five-figure business. That gives Mastering Risk a wider frame than disaster planning alone. It is about building something sturdy when the larger economy feels chaotic. Some episodes lean on stoic thinking: spend scarce attention on what can be controlled and leave room for opportunity when conditions get rough. The delivery is informal, repetitive in a practical way, and aimed at owners who need usable advice more than polished business theater. For solo operators, family shops, and newer entrepreneurs, the show offers a grounded counterweight to hype-driven growth content.
Made for: Mastering Risk suits solo entrepreneurs, microbusinesses, family-owned shops, and small to medium business owners who need practical resilience planning. It is especially useful for operators worried about outages, cybersecurity, cash runway, suppliers, and continuity.
What sets it apart: The show connects disaster and emergency management thinking to everyday small-business operations. Its edge comes from translating risk language into owner-level steps: backups, coordination, incorporation details, insurance gaps, and decisions under uncertainty.
Risk cannot be eliminated, disasters cannot be prevented and you cannot purchase your way to an insulated life. You can identify, codify, judge and mitigate risk in your professional and private life.Non-apocalytpic evidence-based risk and preparedness education, for individuals, families, solo-entrepreneurs, businesses and communities.Your host, Dr. D is a veteran, professor, author and entrepreneur. No one is coming to help, so you and you alone are responsible for your outcomes. The choice is yours, choose wisely.
Four risk domains meet a $72-a-year company when your contingency plan is still mostly vibes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A blunt, practical case for building small in an unstable year.
Mastering Risk treats a side hustle as a practical answer to a politically and economically messy 2026. Dr. D’s point is plain enough: the wider forces are out of reach, so the useful move is to build something that can actually be shaped.
A blunt, practical push for founders who need less theory and more traction.
This episode treats entrepreneurship as a practical job, not a grand theory. It keeps coming back to the basics: start small, pick a name that can work with an available web address, and keep testing until one version fits.
Preparedness as systems thinking, not canned-goods folklore.
This episode treats prepping less like stockpiling and more like a set of systems that need to hold up under strain. Dr. D links household readiness to critical infrastructure and makes a practical case for a 0-to-14-day disruption as the baseline for individuals.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
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Mastering Risk presents operational resilience for small and medium enterprises through four domains: cyber, operations, strategic, and reputational risk.
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This episode discusses how small businesses face frequent disruptions like outages, hacks, or mistakes, and offers intelligence and advice to protect operations and gain a competitive edge.
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This episode discusses the top six preparedness mistakes entrepreneurs make, such as lacking business continuity plans and insurance, and offers solutions to fix them quickly.
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This episode explores how solo entrepreneurs can achieve greater success by building risk communities to navigate economic uncertainty and improve business outcomes.
The host counts down the top 10 reasons startups fail, with a teaser for a surprising number 10, and reflects on listener comments from a previous episode.
Mastering Risk frames entrepreneurship as the cheapest practical response to AI disruption, with the speaker arguing that salaried workers are the most exposed and that professions are slower to change because of legislation.
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This episode celebrates the five-year anniversary of Preparedness Labs Incorporated by discussing evidence-based preparedness for risks like increasing societal violence.
This episode explores the distinction between self-sufficiency and self-reliance using an extended power outage as a case study, while promoting preparedness resources like the Roadmap to Resilience series.