The way people do business is changing, and with each passing year more and more businesses are going under because of outdated ideals and poor management. The companies that continue to grow and get larger are those that understand how to adapt to the future and how to protect the past effectively, as well as those that have contingency plans in place for many different situations.
To explore ways you can protect your business in this modern age, we have put together a short list of things to keep in mind.
Premises Insurance
Your premises are where you business happens, and a lack of insurance at these premises is not only foolhardy, but dangerous for your workers and your wallet.
Businesses only earn money while they do what they exist to do, so if your cafe gets burgled in the night and you don’t have premises insurance, how will you pay to replace the till, the broken window, or the missing safe with this week’s earnings? Insuring your premises is a must for any business type.
Business Interruption Insurance
Something that many larger businesses forget to look into for business insurance is Business Interruption Insurance. This is specialised to help out when a company is struck by a disaster, such as a fire in a woodworking factory, that stops the entire process dead in its tracks. Business Interruption Insurance keeps the normal cash flow coming to the company, allowing them to avoid income losses and layoffs.
Branding
Despite it nearly being 2018, many companies still don’t understand the importance of consistent branding in their products and services, and how that relates to their business. Consistent branding communicates your company’s spread of products and services while keeping them all related back to the company name as a whole.
If your key product has a different colour scheme and imagery around it, separate to your main branding, consumers will assume it belongs to a different company and could end up as a customer of your competitor.
Copyright
A longstanding staple of business protection, copyrighting your original ideas and products prevents copycat companies and competitors from taking your intellectual property and using it to market their own products. It’s one of the most basic forms of business protection, and a must-have for any business serious about its place in the market.
Documentation
If you can’t afford to copyright ideas or designs that your company creates, documenting every aspect of the design process and every single addition to it on notarized and dated documents can act as evidence in court cases to settle disputes over origins of those ideas and products. If you can prove you created something before a competitor, you can protect your intellectual property.
Full Disclosure
Finally, something that many businesses are suffering from these days is the power of the internet and anonymous tip-offs about shady activity in a company. There’s only really one way to avoid this, and that’s to not be shady and to offer full disclosure about your business’s activities to the public. This way, you have everything out in the open from day 1, and can’t suffer from future scrutiny of untoward activities.
With these suggestions you have all you need to defend your business in this modern era.