Employee Theft Poses Huge Risk

One of the most essential, yet one of the most painful tasks that you will encounter as a small business owner is dealing with employee theft.

Frequently, your response is, “But I trusted them.” And that is at the heart of the problem.

Most employee theft occurs because owners present opportunities, unwittingly, to trusted staff. The trust is the open door through which they walk. They know fellow employee patterns, they know your routines, they know the inner workings of the business, they have access to critical data and critical assets, and that opportunity often is too tempting to overlook.

The YouTube video in this post takes a basic look at the problems with trusting employees, and simple mitigation strategies. However, there is no replacement for quality monitoring and follow up. Loss can occur almost anywhere.

A colleague with a skip tracing and bill collection company divorced his wife. She left with the most vital part of their assets: his client lists. She moved to a competing firm, taking the database with her to share. Fortunately, the colleague had an impeccable reputation, and very few clients left him.

A client—a community centre—lost all of their grants to a crooked contract bookkeeper.

Another client counted on his inside security force to keep his inventory safe. But the guard was stealing over $1,500 per week of cigarettes from the storeroom during quiet, overnight hours.

Still another client dissolved his business partnership, when his partner was found to be stripping hundreds of thousands of dollars from an otherwise profitable business.

These are just a few of the risks and pathways that put your small businesses in jeopardy. Reaction is not the most valuable tool you can use for employee loss. Prevention is. The investment in protecting your assets from exposure to loss is far more effective than attempting to recover that money.

Youtube Video unavailable by publisher choice. Type the following header into YouTube to watch the video. How to prevent employees from stealing from you