Jackie King, executive director of Ibec Global, recently argued that resilience is a profit issue, not just a risk issue (per Business Plus). She is right. And most boardrooms still do not act like it.
Here is the claim, stated plainly. Resilience is a profit center. The work you fund to keep operating through disruption protects revenue, defends margin, and wins business. It is not overhead. It is not insurance you hope never to use. Treated correctly, resilience as a profit center earns its budget every quarter, not just during the crisis that justifies it after the fact.
That framing matters, because the alternative has quietly governed how most companies fund this work for thirty years.
The Cost-Center Story Is Wrong
The standard story goes like this. Business continuity, IT disaster recovery, and crisis management are costs you carry to satisfy auditors, regulators, and the occasional nervous board member. You spend the minimum to pass the audit. You write the plans. You file them. You hope nothing happens.
That story is wrong, and it has been expensive.
When resilience is a line item to minimize, three things follow. Budgets get cut first in a downturn, exactly when exposure is highest. Programs report up through risk or compliance, far from the business decisions they should shape. And the work product becomes documentation rather than capability: 300-page plans nobody reads and exercises that test whether a binder is accurate instead of whether leaders can decide under pressure.
The result is predictable. The program looks healthy on paper and collapses on contact with a real event.
Where the Profit Actually Hides
Reframe resilience as a profit center and you start measuring different things.
Start with revenue protection. Every hour of unplanned downtime has a number attached to it. A multi-day outage at a healthcare payer, a financial services firm, or a manufacturer is not an IT inconvenience. It is lost transactions, missed service-level agreements, contractual penalties, and customers who do not come back. The organizations that recover in hours instead of days keep that revenue. That difference is not luck. It is the return on a tested recovery capability.
Then margin. Recovery speed is dictated by coordination, not tooling. The firms that recover fastest are the ones where IT, legal, communications, and the business have practiced working the problem together. That coordination is cheap to build and brutally expensive to improvise. Every day you shorten a recovery is margin you keep instead of burn.
Then trust, which is the slowest thing to build and the fastest to lose. Reputation is not a communications problem. It is a continuity threat with a balance-sheet impact. Customers, regulators, and investors all watch how you perform under pressure. Handle a disruption with speed and clarity and you come out with more trust than you started with. Handle it badly and you spend the next two years explaining yourself.
And increasingly, resilience wins business outright. Enterprise buyers now run resilience due diligence on their critical vendors. Regulators in banking, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are moving operational resilience from guidance to enforcement, through frameworks like DORA and FFIEC. A credible, tested program is becoming a precondition to sell, not a nice-to-have. When your resilience posture is the reason you clear a vendor review and a competitor does not, that is revenue you can name.
I have watched both sides of this. The companies that treat resilience as paperwork discover the cost of that choice on the worst day, in real money, in front of customers. The ones that treat it as capability recover faster, hold their accounts, and use the recovery as proof of why buyers should trust them. Same disruption. Very different P&L.
Here is the shift in plain terms.
| Old View | New View |
| Resilience is a cost to minimize | Resilience is a capability that protects and creates value |
| Funded to pass the audit | Funded to protect revenue and win business |
| Owned by risk or compliance | Owned by the business, sponsored by the executive team |
| Success is a plan on the shelf | Success is operating through disruption faster than competitors |
| Measured by documents produced | Measured by downtime avoided, recovery speed, and trust retained |
What Changes When You Operate This Way
Reframing is not just rhetoric. It changes four concrete decisions.
It changes who owns the work. A profit center does not report up through compliance. It sits with the business leaders whose revenue is on the line, with clear executive sponsorship. Support functions enable. The business owns.
It changes what you measure. Stop counting plans written and start counting downtime avoided, recovery times validated under real conditions, and decisions made in the first hour of an exercise. If a metric does not connect to revenue, margin, or trust, it does not belong in the board report.
It changes how you exercise. A tabletop exercise that checks whether the plan is accurate is a compliance exercise. A tabletop that puts the executive team under realistic pressure, with incomplete information and a ticking clock, is a capability investment. One produces a checkmark. The other produces leaders who can protect the P&L when it counts.
And it changes the conversation with the board. “We are compliant” is a defensive posture. “We recover faster than our competitors, and here is what that protects” is a strategic one. The first gets your budget cut in the next downturn. The second gets it funded.
None of this requires more spending. In most organizations it requires the same spending, pointed at capability instead of paperwork, and measured against the business instead of the audit.
King is right that resilience is a profit issue. The harder truth is that calling it one is not enough. You have to fund it, own it, and measure it like one.
Do that, and resilience stops being the cost you defend and becomes the capability that defends you.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
Build the operating model. Our Resilience Operating Model® is how we turn resilience from a compliance line item into a business capability that pays for itself.
Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.
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