When Your Website Becomes a Supply Chain Case Study
There’s a particular kind of irony in being a business continuity and resilience consultant whose own website has spent the better part of the last year effectively out of action.
But here we are. And since the new Cambridge Risk Solutions website went live this week, it feels like the right moment to reflect honestly on the journey — because it turned out to be a rather good illustration of everything we tell clients about supplier risk.
It started simply enough
Like most small businesses, we’ve gone through several iterations of our website over the years. Some have been better than others. One agency, we discovered rather too late, had taken a creative approach to demonstrating our credentials — including inventing members of staff who did not exist. That was a memorable lesson in due diligence.
More recently, things became considerably more disruptive. An agency we engaged managed to reduce our daily visitor numbers from several hundred to something close to zero. The replacement agency double-billed us, took some time to return the money, and — with impressive timing — folded approximately one week after our refund came through. The agency that followed inherited the mess, but never quite managed to solve a persistent spam user problem that ultimately forced us to turn off all contact functionality on the site.
For nine months, our main shop window had no way for potential clients to get in touch. Not ideal.
The complexity you don’t know you have
The process of moving to a new supplier threw up one final surprise. It turned out that our DNS was being managed through a Cloudflare account that had been set up at some point by a previous agency — an account we didn’t know existed, in our name, that we had no access to.
This is, of course, a textbook example of something we see regularly in client supply chains. The dependency you haven’t mapped. The critical function sitting with a third party you’d half forgotten about. The thing that only becomes visible when you try to change something.
It’s easy to assume that supply chain complexity is a problem for manufacturers, or logistics businesses, or organisations with hundreds of suppliers. In reality, even a small professional services firm can find itself with a surprisingly tangled web of dependencies — hosting providers, domain registrars, DNS managers, design agencies, platform licences — each one a potential point of failure, and not all of them obvious until something goes wrong.
What we have now
The new site is cleaner, more visual, and more professional. It’s been deliberately simplified — fewer moving parts, clearer ownership, and suppliers we’ve properly vetted this time around. Contact functionality is back. The shop window is open again.
It also more accurately reflects what Cambridge Risk Solutions actually does and where the business is today, which after eighteen years felt overdue.
We’re pleased with it. We’re also, frankly, relieved.
And if nothing else, the last few years have given us a very useful set of real-world examples for conversations with clients about why supplier risk deserves more attention than it usually gets — right up until the moment it doesn’t.
You can take a look at the new site at www.cambridge-risk.com.
