Whether you rent our or are renting, protecting your business space while you are at home is a wise investment. But how do you do it in these uncertain times? Follow these tips to find out.
Renting out your building is an exercise in trust. Similarly, renting a property space from a landlord comes with the obligation that you will keep it as safe as possible while it is in your possession. Keeping your business safe at night is a real threat to the modern business. The more expensive your products, the higher the risk. There comes a point when remote security services simply don’t cover the potential risk for your insurance company, and you have to dip into the pond of protecting your building when you are not around.
Which Types of Businesses Hire Out of Hours Help?
Almost every business has people coming and going throughout the night. A hotelier must be there first thing or last thing to let the cleaners in and the kitchen staff go home. A recreation centre might hire a security guard to patrol around the grounds if they have expensive sporting equipment on site. Nightclubs hire bar staff to come in and set up through the day, and restaurants require chefs to be there at 5 am to receive fish and meat orders. Although prevalent in the service industry, all types of industries need to find safe ways to secure their premises after 5pm.
The Four Ways to Protect Your Building Out of Hours
There are a few ways to fight back and protect your temporarily empty business or property from thieves.
1 – Hire a Facilities Manager
Advertising online for facilities manager jobs allows you to find the people that you need to protect your building when you are not there. Whether you rent an office space, a commercial building, or a scrapyard in the middle of nowhere – a facilities manager will always provide onsite protection while you are not there. If you have an apartment block, the manager might stay onsite and deal with maintenance problems. If you run a busy restaurant, you may want someone to stay there through the night and protect your assets, and so on.
2 – Online Protection
Once you have a dedicated person in charge of your building out of hours, you should turn your attention to the online world. Your bricks & mortar isn’t the only asset your business has. Your website, your customer details, and your opportunities in e-commerce, all depend on uninterrupted network services. If your communications systems go down or if your cloud applications stop working, it could be the result of a data breach. There are two ways to protect yourself from these.
Data breaches cost the average UK small business £1,200 a year. When customer data is stolen, you lose reputation. Your business suffers as a result. Stop cyberattacks in their tracks by hiring an IT support service to fulfil your online security needs. Have them test your system for flaws and patch up any potential leaks. Secondly, routinely updating your tech systems online and offline can help keep you ahead of the hackers.
3 – CCTV Systems
An established, successful small business will spend the money on a security team to assess their business’s needs. In a perfect world, we can use CCTV cameras to cover all the blind spots in our building and on our grounds. The perfect small business would hire a security guard to patrol those grounds all night, looking for potential dangers. Realistically speaking, the average small business cannot spend that type of money on something that doesn’t technically make a profit.
The cheat’s version? You can place an official looking sign in your window which says CCTV cameras are in operation 24 hours a day and go home at night. It doesn’t beat the real thing, but it might act as a deterrent for wily criminals.
4 – Light it Up and Make it Noisy
It is a well-known fact that burglars work best under the cover of darkness. It is many times more difficult to break into a building which has alarms and bright lights all around it. If the trick to protecting your property out of hours is to deter criminals on to the next easier target, then making lots of noise and leaving the lights on is the best way to do it.
Protect your Property 24/7
What this all boils down to is how your business or building can be as safe as houses, even after hours. You have to do it without booby traps and while remaining within the law. In a world filled with both physical and virtual threats; are you doing enough to protect it?
