Enterprise Risk Management and resilience in SMEs during COVID-19 pandemic: The case of Italian dealerships

COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in organizations’ strategic behaviour, from identifying and mitigating specific risks to increasing business resilience. The object of this chapter is to investigate how Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) practices help increase small and medium-sized Italian dealerships strategic and operational resilience, through supporting them to tackle the challenges raised by the disruption and effectively safeguarding their organization’s operational performance. The research relies on in-depth interviews made to professionals of ten companies and on extant frameworks that inform the findings interpretation. The results show that, as defender type firms, the companies investigated initially undervalued COVID-19 crisis effects on their business. Despite this, they transformed their business models to ensure their survival and adapted their risk management processes during and following the shock to build business resilience against future disruptions. The study offers brand new empirical evidence of ERM and resilience within SMEs and provides professionals with a self-assessment checklist on their resilience building capability.