As a business owner, you can’t afford not to keep all of your assets, product, and capital safe from harm. This includes not only break-ins but unexpected disasters of all types such as fire. Whether you’re a novice entrepreneur or have been in the market for a lifetime, compare your business to this checklist to make sure you have all the right business security systems to suit your needs.
1. Burglary prevention: analyze the likelihood of a robbery and arm your building accordingly.
a. Depending on the net worth of your products and the neighborhood you’re in, your burglary prevention needs will vary. However, it is unwise to go without protection at all or rely on locking doors at the end of the day. In 2013, over $4 billion in losses were reported by victims of burglary. A majority of robberies occur during the final weeks of the year—Christmas and New Years time—when stores are likely to be carrying extra cash or inventory. Don’t leave your business vulnerable to theft; there are a variety of alarm systems available for you as the owner to choose from. Your system can have code-access control or card-access control; it can utilize camera or video footage, or an audio-based intrusion detection system; it can immediately notify authorities of the alarm being set off or it can have a thirty second delay. It is up to you to decide if a top notch security system or a single camera on your front door is what is best to keep you, your employees, and your customers safe.
2. Protect your valuables from fire.
a. Does your business have fire protection? Don’t lose your whole livelihood to something that could have been prevented or, at least, stopped before it was too late. Not only do you need to make sure that your business security systems include sprinklers, smoke and heat detection, and fire extinguishers, but it is also important to have a regular plan in place for checking the integrity and functionality of the equipment. A dozen smoke alarms in your building will do nothing in the event of a fire if the batteries in the alarms are dead.
3. It may be difficult, but you should address internal loss of capital.
a. No business owner wants to consider the possibility that their employees are to blame for loss of money, product or business. However, if you are experiencing a loss problem and you haven’t explored this option, you should. Employees could be actively stealing from you or causing loss through ignorance. For example, as a restaurant owner, if you discovered an employee was errantly trained to throw out a certain salad after two days instead of four, that is pure capital loss for you as the owner and can be corrected through retraining. However, if you find that your loss is being generated by employees committing discount fraud or taking money from registers, it is time to immediately remove them from your establishment and consider new employment screening and monitoring methods.
Owning a business comes with its challenges, but don’t let one of those be losing profit due to a preventable issue. Check to make sure that your hard-earned place of work is armored with the best business security systems against even the worst scenarios of robbery, natural disaster, or even employee dishonesty.