Ensure your business is safe from intruders no matter your budget
When starting a brick-and-mortar small business, the last thing you want to worry about it is a break-in. Addressing your business’s physical vulnerabilities from the beginning can help save you heartache down the road. While there’s a wide range of security measures you can take, you can find ways to have strong security on a budget as long as you understand your unique needs. So how do you discover what physical vulnerabilities your business faces?
Assessing Your Business for Vulnerabilities
When evaluating your location for vulnerabilities, it’s important to consider local crime. You can find statistics about crime including robberies freely available online with resources like My Local Crime. If your business is located in an area with a higher crime rate, you will need stronger mitigations to protect yourself. You may also want to consider your proximity to a police station, as a faster response time can help make your business safer and may drive down local crime.
One of the simplest ways to assess your business for vulnerabilities is to walk around your property, trying to see it through a potential threat’s eyes. Do this both during the day and after dark. Are there areas where there aren’t any cameras, or areas that aren’t lit at all at night? Can computers, cash registers or valuable equipment easily be seen through the windows? Can the back of the building easily be accessed, or are there easy places to hide? You also want to consider what businesses are around yours or that you share a parking lot with. For example, a bar will mean intoxicated people hanging around late at night.
Something that can easily be overlooked is key control. For any business, you want to know where all your keys are and limit how many people have access to one. If keys are lost or stolen, you need to change your locks and distribute new keys for the best security.
You can also outsource a vulnerability assessment to make sure it’s completed by experts. An assessment like this will typically run you between $500 and $1,000 and will come with recommendations on how to best secure your business based on how much you’re able to spend.
Mitigating Physical Vulnerabilities
Once you’ve found your physical vulnerabilities, you need to address them with mitigations. What mitigations you use will likely depend on your budget. If you have a tight budget, you want to start with an alarm system. You can get an all-in-one system that will cover both your front and back doors and have a motion detector and glass break sensor. An alarm system can serve as a major deterrent to crime even if it’s the only thing you can afford. Visible cameras are also a strong deterrent.
An access control system is a good way to limit the number of keys to your building and lets you see who has accessed the building in the case of any incidents. Instead of every employee having a key to the back door, you can give keys only to openers and closers and give unique door codes to each employee. High-quality locks will also make a big difference in your security.
Not all mitigations mean buying new equipment. Changing the way the store is laid out can also help improve your security. Make sure to keep your registers, computers or other valuable equipment away from windows and toward the back of the store. Smash and grabs, where thieves break a window and grab whatever they can quickly, leaving before police arrive, are a major risk. Keep the amount of people with knowledge of things like the location of or code for a safe to a minimum.
Whatever budget you’re working with, security needs to be a priority. Investing in security from the start can save you a lot of pain down the line.
Not sure where to start with your San-Diego-based business? Adamo can help. Our team of experts will conduct a vulnerability assessment of your business and give you a good, better and best set of recommendations so you can secure your business, whatever your budget. Contact us to learn more about how we can build a custom security solution to meet your needs.
