If you own a business, that means you have various investments, some of which may not even seem like an investment. Anything into which you put your time, money, or energy has to be monitored and protected, whether it’s a building, or the people who work for you. In fact, your team is one of the most important investments that you will make, so let’s start with them.
Looking Out for Your Team
Sometimes the thing into which you’re investing the most money and energy are your employees; so, they should receive a good deal of your attention.
The thing is, if you carefully select quality employees, then you can feel good about devoting some resources to taking care of them, and you’ll find that you need to keep them happy if you want them to stay with your company.
Equipment & Facilities
It’s always a better policy to spend a little money up front for things like maintenance of equipment and upkeep of facilities, rather than spending a lot more when things break or fall apart, and need to be replaced.
This applies not only to regular maintenance of your equipment, but also applies to protecting infrastructure and facilities, which means keeping an eye on what requires attention, such as preventative repairs or upgrades.
Watch the Books
Hopefully, you have someone who handles your books for you to take the weight off of your shoulders, but even so, it’s not a bad idea to check in periodically and make sure that your business is making sound financial decisions.
It’s good to let your accounting professional or team handle the appropriation of expenditure and organization of funds, but as the ultimate responsibility falls on the owner, you should also make sure it’s heading in a direction that aligns with good business and your vision for the company.
Make it Secure
Do you have a brick-and-mortar store that houses your business? Don’t hesitate to install security cameras inside and out, as well as a quality alarm system on the premises. Does your store happen to be a website only?
Your site must be just as secure as a real-world store, complete with cyber attack protection and online payment and personal data security. To protect your investment, security must be rigorously maintained and kept current.
Data Backup
Even before we had the Internet, backing up business documents and creating redundancies has always been important to guard against the loss of information. Now, in the same way, you have to back up your data, online and otherwise.
Even if you don’t utilize an online backup service like Carbonite, for example (there are many more to choose from), you have to create copies of your data somewhere, such as a private server or external hard drives.
Avoiding the Control of Investors
Sometimes having investors is necessary to keep your business running, which is a godsend when you don’t have sufficient capital on your own. Many times this poses a significant problem, though, when those investors start to gain some control over your company.
If they have the opportunity, investors will often attempt to steer your company in a specific direction because they are looking out for their investment; but you have to watch out for your investment and never allow that to happen. It’s your company, and you have the vision that will make it prosperous for everyone.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.