The recent and ongoing stock market mayhem and extraordinary events in the worldwide financial markets have left many business owners and managers anxious about yet more shocks. In a recent talking heads piece on the global market turmoil in The Guardian, Sir Martin Sorrell gave a brutally honest assessment that we had our annual strategy meeting in New York this week and you could smell the fear.

I imagine a few printing industry boardrooms are a bit whiffy too, so rather than chew off your fingernails in the manner of Gordon Brown, now would seem to be as good a time as any to make a warts-and-all reassessment of your company’s client base, and indeed any worrying levels of exposure to any single customer. I’m not privy to the creditors’ lists of Silverjet, Zoom Airlines and XL Leisure but I imagine there’s a print bill or two among the figures therein. And not so long ago, if a printer had a client list featuring such blue-chip names as Lehman Brothers or HBOS the management would probably have (rightly) felt pretty pleased with themselves and confident about the way things were going. Now, with who knows what around the corner, it’s probably safer to adopt the mindset whereby there quite simply is no such thing as a blue-chip client anymore.

Large clients that make up a sizeable chunk of turnover, or profit, should be under even closer scrutiny than usual. News in recent months such as Simpson Group and Sainsbury’s, and TPF and Sky, has demonstrated the potential impact of the loss of one big client. The oft-quoted business maxim is to avoid a situation where any one client accounts for more than 20% of turnover. However, that’s still quite a chunk and quite a big problem if it disappears overnight. At the recent BPIF finance conference, Howitt managing director Gurdev Singh explained how the group has set its own limit at 10%, which I imagine is quite a challenge given the size of its operations and client base. But it’s an admirable practice, especially in these straitened times.

Another useful management exercise has been espoused by Simon Biltcliffe, that famously shy and retiring boss of Webmart, and it’s worth repeating here. Biltcliffe believes every business should remove its top two accounts from the equation and look at the management accounts figures that would result from their absence. I have little doubt he does this himself at Webmart: he’s that kind of guy.

Taking a long hard look at what shape a business would be in should the worst happen, and whether or not it would be sustainable, sounds like an extremely useful assessment. Even if the answer turns out to be pretty scary in its bleakness, it will at least afford the possibility of being able to do something about it before it’s too late.

Jo Francis is associate editor, Print Group Haymarket