Is Your Small Busine Spurring an Adolescent Flashback? by Pete Lorenco

Did your mother dress you funny as a kid? Did you have acne? Or maybe your baggage was a little more invisible, like being afraid to ask someone to the prom. Either way, those years between childhood and mature adulthood took their toll-and you're very glad they're confined to a moldy yearbook in your parents' attic.

Unfortunately, a small business can also experience the professional equivalent of splitting your shorts on the pommel horse in gymnastics-they're just not as colorful. Traumas can include:

Unmanageable amounts of paper. Just like your mother nagged you to clean your room and not leave your expensive guitar on the stairs, federal, state and industry regulators have some very specific incentives (aka laws) that target the vital records you're storing next to the candy machine.

Growing piles of refuse. Your modern-day version of lunch plates under the bed are the towers of worthless documents (perhaps containing customer information and other proprietary data) forever awaiting shredding by some overburdened staffer. Or maybe you're throwing them into an unsecured dumpster, where anyone can browse the stacks.

Unsecured data. Remember what happened when your roommate on the freshman-class trip browsed your diary? The 2013 version of that tragedy is the one-of-a-kind, unsecured files on your computer network that just got hacked. That's far worse than 34 kids finding out which Saved By the Bell character you wanted to date.

As someone who's spent a good amount of time around a growing business, I can tell you that these are actually good problems to have-as long as they get fixed as soon as you identify them, so you can avoid a second awkward adolescence. Here's how.

Take inventory. Buried in data? Create a list that details each type of record. Who may need it? How will these employees use it? How quickly would you need to retrieve it?

Kill the dupes. Identify all cases where copies are hindering your workplace's efficiency, posing a security risk and eating up valuable office space.

Develop the urge to purge. The risks associated with mishandled sensitive information should compel you to shred. Start by determining what kind of information you want to securely shred, and then vet potential vendors to help you build a plan and get everyone on board with it.

Go with a flow. Establish workflows: What storage media will you use? How will you index records, and who will be authorized to retrieve them? Reduce the number of people who touch each type of information, or perhaps streamline approval processes to cut down on copies.

Rethink your processes. Remember when you graduated from the bike with the banana seat to that classy ten-speed? Likewise, your business can't maintain customer files as casually as it did when your desk was the dining room table. Always be open to rethinkingwhat you might consider a sacred process.

Not every small business is the same. The challenges caused by growth are universal, just like the growing pains of youth. The difference now is that you know better.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/small-business/is-you...
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