A Brief Guide to Protecting Your Small Business from Risk
Any size of business, from a self-employed trader or sole-proprietor to a multi-national corporation, is exposed to risk every day through fraud, misconduct, negligence, cyberattack, and many more forms of potential harm and from numerous sources including employees, customers, suppliers, and associates.
When you are a small business with limited funds and no access to an in house technical team or legal department, protecting your company can be that much harder with the onus just on you, and can place smaller or micro businesses at a higher vulnerability, with the impact of risk being of greater consequence.
So, what can you do to safeguard your valued and hard-earned business and how can you act to prevent or remove harm before the damage is irreparable?
What sort of risk is a small business exposed to?
There are many forms and potential perpetrators of harm to your small business; employees have inside access and can submit fraudulent sick pay or injury compensation claims, steal company stock or property, breach data protection and misuse company information, commit time theft, and many other possible threats.
Even if you don’t have any employees, there are other areas of risk your sole trader business can be harmed by such as identity theft or cybercrime, customers failing to pay for services on credit, suppliers not delivering goods you have paid for, bookkeepers embezzling funds to name but a few.
It can feel like risk is everywhere when you own or run a small business and that keeping is safe can be more of a full time job than the actual work you set up to undertake!
How can I keep my small business safe?
It’s important that you ensure checks and balances throughout the infrastructure of your business no matter how small and that includes cyber security software, employee monitoring through double tasking, oversight, and your physical presence in the workplace or virtual presence online, and security measures such as CCTV.
Take time to fully check out any potential new recruits so you know they can be trusted with your company information and activities, and also make sure you know exactly who you are extending credit to, or if a supplier or contractor you intend to work with is legitimate and trustworthy.
Keep a close eye on accounts, stocktaking, invoicing, and timesheets, and make certain that you have policies and procedures in place with regard to health and safety and security measures that your staff and associates are fully informed about to prevent risk of claim or challenge regarding such matters.
But what if my small business is already at risk?
If you have already spotted indicators that your business is under threat or experiencing harm such as dodgy sick pay claims, missing stock, data breach, anomalies in accounts or invoicing records, loans in your company name you didn’t arrange, internal system hacking, or any other sign, you need to act fast.
Ongoing harm will have a serious impact on your revenue and potentially your business reputation and the resulting loss of income can quickly be enough to put a small business in dire straits and beyond repair.
An area of support that you may not have considered before as a small business is professional corporate investigation.
I-Spy private detective agency specializing in corporate investigative services and can find out the facts about any harm being done to your business and accurately identify the perpetrator, providing you with irrefutable evidence of any wrongdoing.
I-Spy Private investigator Cardiff offers debtor tracing, covert surveillance, asset tracking, data recovery, undercover work, fraud investigation, and many more investigative services that will uncover the truth and equip you with proof to take action to protect your business and helpful advice and tools to keep it safe.
