4 Ways To Best Protect Your Business
Whether you’re a newly-minted entrepreneur or a veteran of the corporate world, protecting your business is always the greatest priority. Even the smartest owners often fail to guard their flanks in the drive to succeed, forgoing the often difficult task of defending their assets from opportunistic criminals. Here are five straightforward but crucial steps that business owners should take in protecting their business.
1. Prioritize Cybersecurity
The business world runs on information. Even if a business is a traditional brick-and-mortar store, chances are high that it has at least some e-commerce presence or does financial transactions digitally. This creates a massive opportunity for cybercriminals. Thankfully, defenses are advancing just as quickly as threats. So are the deployment doctrines being used to make the most of those countermeasures. The zero trust architecture model puts an emphasis on the verification of credentials for each connection in a network. Endpoint security protocols seek to standardize digital defenses in cases where a variety of devices are used for business purposes. Study the threats and then plan your official online safety policy to counter them.
2. Choose Your Legal Form Wisely
This should actually be your first consideration when forming a business since it has so many potential ramifications down the road, especially concerning taxes and liability. Many entrepreneurs and gig workers start out as a sole proprietorship (the simplest incorporation form), but this offers no protection should you get sued. Limited liability corporations, S corporations and partnerships all have different advantages and disadvantages, so it’s important to do your research and find out what the optimum structure will be for your specific business plan.
3. Make Sure You’re Insured
The majority of businesses need some kind of insurance. General liability insurance is the most common and can protect against claims of physical injury or libel. Many businesses need more than this. Commercial property insurance can protect buildings and equipment, while professional liability insurance (also called errors and omissions insurance) guards against claims that you made a mistake in the services you provided to someone. It’s worth contacting a good attorney for your business long before you actually have any legal issues since they can keep you from accidentally stepping into those issues in the first place.
4. Have a Flexible Business Model
As the entire year of 2020 proved, forces outside the control of management can and will emerge and have a massive effect on operations. The best you can do is be prepared, and the best way to be prepared is to be agile. The organizational model of your business can have a serious impact on versatility. Most businesses operate under a hierarchical structure, with managers at the top and a mass of workers beneath. This can be good for creating specialists and centralized decision making, but a flat organizational structure, in which authority and responsibility are decentralized, can make the whole organization more adaptable to rapid change.
5. Know Your Employees
Right now, business owners are scrambling to find employees, but it’s vital to make sure that you’re onboarding honest people. Unfortunately, we live in an age where trust and honor are all too hard to come by. Studies show that workplace theft costs around $50 billion annually in the US alone. According to Statistic Brain, it also accounts for over 42% of US store inventory loss, a serious blow to logistics. Conducting a background check via sites like Goodhire is a smart move, as is double-checking the credentials of those you hire. This level of scrutiny doesn’t just prevent theft; it pays dividends down the road in terms of employee retention. Employees who care are more likely to stick around, saving owners the cost of having to replace them. Everyone wins when everyone’s acting above-board.
Nobody can know exactly what the future will bring in terms of threats to their business. What you can always do, though, is stay aware of those potential challenges and make a plan of defense so that your business will survive.
