Life was sweet — right up until the phone rang. My business had rocketed up the rankings for our natural and effective sensitive skincare formulations, thanks to some successful viral marketing. Child’s Farm had gone from a small challenger brand to nipping at the heels of the category leader in just three years. We were on fire and couldn’t make the products quickly enough.

So I was totally unprepared for the call from my manufacturer to say there had been a complaint about our main product, the baby moisturiser, raised through a local trading standards office. A full investigation was pending. Could I share our product recall procedure, so we were aligned and ready to execute it at a moment’s notice?

Our product recall what? We didn’t have one. It simply hadn’t occurred to us. With our backs against the wall, I hired an excellent but very expensive specialist consultant to help us design and be ready to execute a product recall process within 48 hours.

How on earth do you maintain trust in a product you have to recall? How do you communicate this with your retailer without them pulling everything you supply them with off the shelf? All of this had to be planned, written and signed off at speed.

Thankfully, tests carried out on the product and others from the same batch proved it was an isolated incident, possibly involving tampering. But it was 48 hours of panic I never want to relive.

I’ve always believed that in a previous life I was a housekeeper in a big house. I’m the person who always has a Dymo tape to hand, labelling every shelf in the airing cupboard, with immaculate piles of pillowcases. I took the same attitude into my business career: a perfect filing system, processes for everything, even different coloured folders to ensure conformity across client accounts. I drove the team mad by moving files around and renaming them so they were “tidy”.

But that insistence on organisation paid off. When it came to pulling together the information needed as the business was acquired by PZ Cussons, the consumer goods giant, for £40 million in 2022, it was done in 48 hours. This earned us a gold star from our lawyers for being the most organised business they’d ever dealt with.

Still, it’s what you don’t know that trips you up. With legislation forever changing, the new year for a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) should be a moment to review processes and practices to ensure they remain relevant and up to date, risk resilient and compliant. Prepare to fail, don’t fail to prepare, as the old adage goes.

My new year’s review list would include the following.

Trading standards

If you sell products to consumers, make friends with your local trading standards officer — they are not just about market stalls and food. Strong relationships, where you keep them informed about label changes, new accreditations or clinical trials, will stand you in good stead should there ever be an issue.

Product recall process

Be clear about what you would need to do should you have to recall a product from the shelf, including internal and external communications. Run this past your trading standards officer and also check they meet your insurers’ expectations. When our potential product recall loomed, our local trading standards officer was available and supportive and I believe that the relationship we’d built with her helped enormously.

Intellectual property

Ensure registrations reflect your strategic expansion plans. If a new country is on the horizon for 2026, check you’ve listed your products there. And if you’ve developed products in new categories, you’ll need to register those, too. If you have eye-catching or brand distinctive labels, your “get up”, consider registering this too. We had two copycat attempts by a private business and even a big supermarket, which we were able to stop in their tracks because we had registered the layout of our labels.

Website compliance

Check that changes to consumer rights legislation, GDPR and privacy requirements are properly reflected in your website’s terms and conditions. While you’re at it, get a teenager to go through the motions of navigating your site from page to page to check for hiccups, typos and link issues. £15 an hour is the going rate for this in our house.

Domain names

Auto-renewal helps, but do you own all the top-level domains you need to protect your brand? Think .biz, .store or .co. A quick sweep now can prevent later issues.

Employment contracts

While we await clarity on how the government intends to implement the Employment Rights Act, it’s worth checking that contracts remain relevant and that you’re ready for the impact any changes could have on your business structure.

Cyberattack protocol

Last month The Times reported that four in ten businesses have experienced a cyberattack in the past year, yet only 27 per cent of large businesses have someone on the board responsible for cybersecurity. Find a specialist to help you prepare a clear plan should your systems be compromised, and keep a hard copy somewhere safe.

None of this is glamorous, and none of it will ever trend on LinkedIn. But for SMEs, resilience is built quietly, in advance, in documents you hope never to use and processes you pray you’ll never have to follow.

Growth can be intoxicating, but the real test of a business doesn’t come when everything is going right: it comes when something goes wrong. The new year isn’t just about setting ambitious targets; it’s about reviewing the foundations beneath them. Because when the phone rings with the call you weren’t expecting, preparation isn’t just comforting — it’s essential to survival.

Joanna Jensen is founder of @childsfarm and author of Making Business Child’s Play. She is an angel investor and an advocate of women in business.

Hannah Prevett is away