Small Business Big World
New episodes every Tuesday discussing the challenges, adventures and fun of being a small business owner. Each week we'll delve into various small business topics, from real-world DEI considerations to selling your business, using video to market your business, unique benefit offerings for your employees and so much more. Curated by the crew at Paper Trails.
Small Business Big World
Security Strategies for Protecting Your Small Business
Are you ready to unlock the secrets to safeguarding your small business? Join us as we sit down with Detective Steve Borst from the Kennebunk Police Department, who shares his insights on essential security measures that every small business owner should know. From the basics of securing your premises with locks, lighting, and cameras to the importance of community programs like Virtual Neighborhood Watch, Detective Borst provides expert advice on creating a safe environment for your employees and customers. We'll also discuss the critical need for registering your business with local authorities, ensuring effective communication and support during incidents.
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast prepared by the team at Paper Trails. Owning and running a small business is hard. Each week, we'll dive into the challenges, headaches, trends, fun and excitement of running a small business. After all, small businesses are the heartbeat of America and our team is here to keep them beating. Welcome to Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast where we talk about everything small business. Today, my guest is Detective Steve Borst. Very official title Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Steve's a police detective here at the Kennebunk Police Department, very fortunate to have a great local police department here, very supportive of the community, which we'll talk a little bit about a little bit later, but certainly today we're going to kind of talk about safety and security in your business, which is usually at the bottom of most people's list, right? True, the top of the list is you know, hiring and bringing in sales and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:And even for me, right, you've had to teach me a few things, which is good, so I think it'll be a really fun conversation. But before we get going, don't forget we are everywhere that you download your podcast. So Spotify, facebook, instagram, you name it, we're there. Apple Podcasts you go find us. We're out there at Small Business Big World. Certainly, if you have any questions for us or for Steve, feel free to shoot us an email podcast at papertrailscom, and we will be there to answer those for you and get going. So, steve, let's talk about security basics for small business. So I'm small business, you know, small town America, just like us.
Speaker 2:What are the real basic things I should be thinking about in terms of security and safety for me, my employees, my customers? Yep, think of it like this structurally your business, your brick and mortar simple locks, lights, cameras real simple, doesn't have to get crazy expensive, crazy elaborate keep that, keep that footage. A lot of people have a dvr kind of setup uh, yourself included, who you can manage, how long you want to keep the footage, what starts the footage, what ends the footage? To this day and age, almost every crime that would happen, like in a downtown area or wherever, should be on video somewhere. It's up to us to try to go and find it. We have a program here in town called Virtual Neighborhood Watch. You're a member and it's like a clearinghouse for people to just log on and say, hey, my house is here, my business is there, I have this many cameras, I keep it for 30 days and if you need something, let me know.
Speaker 1:Even the ring cams right, we all have ring cams, doorbell cams, things like that, easy stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Make your business one that they want to pass up on. So if somebody wants to come into town and do some burglaries, uh, on the overnight shift, and they see three businesses make yours the one that's lit up, that they say uh, I see he's got cameras in use. Now we'll pass this one, we'll go to the next one it's funny.
Speaker 1:So we had an incident here at the office early this year where we had what we thought were checks stolen, but, you know, and we didn't have cameras at the office. Right, I'm a trusting Mainer, I gosh, I barely even locked my house, so I shouldn't tell you that, I shouldn't put that on the world, but it is locked and we have cameras and all those good things. But we definitely, you know, learned that we needed to have some cameras here because we had checks missing, and I think it was just a big misunderstanding.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day but because they got returned like two days later. I think it was the mailman that got confused. But you know it's important, right. And now we do look at those, not often, but if something's going on. I know you know one of my employees. He gets bored on Sunday morning and checks things out. You know what's going on but you know it's important to have those, I think.
Speaker 2:Right, it's an investment.
Speaker 1:Protect your investment, yeah and even things you know. You talked about lighting, right.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not just to make your property look good, but it's also a safety thing, even for your clients or your customers, your staff in and out, you know, keep it safe.
Speaker 1:Well lit, well lit, yeah right, snow, things like that. You know trips and falls, you'd be surprised too.
Speaker 2:On the midnight shift we do building checks every night. How many buildings People? Just it's Friday, they want to get out of here, they want to go to work, to get out of work and go home and they forget to simply lock their door. You know, we'll have guys and girls on the midnight shift checking doors.
Speaker 1:They find an open door Right. So too, because I've come in on Saturday morning when you know, after the cruise has been here and oh, the door's unlocked. So I didn't get a call from you guys, but so certainly you know that kind of brings through another piece right, registering your business, right.
Speaker 2:So we just learned our business isn't even registered with you guys, right? We have a site file that every business in town can go into it's free. Every business in town can go into it's free. And it's just the business, the address, the phone numbers, the contact information for people during the day, after hours, who the alarm company is, things like that. And it's just a quick pointer system for us to say hey, here at Paper Trails, we should know it's Chris, it's at this phone number, right, and if something does happen, right then we can call. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Right, then we can call yeah, absolutely Right, and that's just another thing. If you see something in the middle of the night, pick up the phone.
Speaker 2:You're going to call me Right Rather than you know, figure, trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1:So that's the basics and, you know, certainly I think we all need to go back to basics in our business, which is important. So thank you for that. So let's talk about planning for the worst. Right, we'd ever want to think about those worst case scenarios, but there are emergency situations that happen in every business, even an office business. Right, it's not always. You know, everyone thinks of safety and manufacturing and construction, but maybe not in your retail or restaurant or other workplace, any scenario I think about disgruntled customer or former employee or spouse of an employee.
Speaker 2:There's no business or location that's immune. I mean, we've seen incidents happen in schools, churches, businesses, public you know public events. So I think like, how do you, if that was to happen in your setting, what are the steps that you could take to help minimize it? You know we talked about the three basics already lighting, locks, cameras. Another thing there's a couple businesses in town that utilize a panic button. It's a function off their particular security system that they employ If there's an issue with a customer they hit almost like a silent alarm at a bank, sends a signal to dispatch and we're on the way. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what other planning though? So should businesses be doing emergency planning? I?
Speaker 2:mean, we even do it at the police department for, like, I think we call it like a fire alarm drill. If something happened in the police department we all had to get out, where would you go? You want to keep track of how many people you have on at a particular time. If you had to get everybody out of paper trails right now, you should have a place to go and who's going to keep track of who's there and who's not there and who's still back up inside. Simple security things like an evacuation plan, like a phone tree. If something happened here and you were having a, let's just say, in a half an hour you're going to have a client come in. Well, something's happening here. You don't want the client to walk into it, so so-and-so needs to call them.
Speaker 2:Look at calendars things like that yeah right, Things like that. Just try to think big picture.
Speaker 1:Right, you want to minimize the things we don't want to ever worry about, right, right, yeah, I mean we're lucky, you know, but it can happen. Well, we think about it in terms of our business continuity of oh, the internet goes out right, my whole world's shut down. If the internet goes out, right, that's right, even if you think from a safety perspective you know, god forbid, you know there's a fire or an active shooter or a disgruntled employee or any of those things.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:You know, thinking, thinking ahead. How do you handle that Right?
Speaker 2:You know there's places that will do like site assessments. You know how many doors do you have, how many windows do you have, egress parking employees, like we do it once a year at the police department, we have an employee list and it's your name, your phone number, your next of kin, who to call in an emergency, your children's name, if you have kids, that you know. Let's say you had an employee and something horrific happened and they had to. You know you had to notify them. Hey, we've got to get the kids out of school. Little things like that. It's a lot of information.
Speaker 1:That planning is really good and you that it's a lot of information. Yeah, that planning is really good, and one of the things that I don't think people think about in terms of planning is how do you deal with the human element of that? Right, we see the TikToks every day of the people screaming at service employees and things like that, or disgruntled employees having to deal with those kinds of things. Someone comes in your business and said, oh, if you do that, I'm going to call the cops, right, how do you guys handle that? How do you diffuse that? How can you prepare for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's anything, it's any service-oriented part of life. You're going to have happy customers and not so happy customers. We will always go. If you call, we will always go. We're not going to say who's right and who's wrong. We're going to look at how the law works in this particular situation and if somebody needs to go someone's not going to get a trespass warning or whatever but we'll always go and try to mediate those things. And if crimes were committed, then we'll get some input from the business owner and say is this something that you want to sign off on and go to court for as a witness or a victim? And we'll take it from there. But we always try to mediate stuff before that.
Speaker 1:And I would say nine, Nine times out of 10, those are truly just you know misunderstandings Exactly. People are, you know, amped up and they, you know they just their emotions get the best of them, right, correct?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know it makes for great TikToks, right. For a lot of people, right, it doesn't make for great business, no, no no-transcript let it get to the point right Be a good human being and don't let it get to the point where it's an that's not usually good PR.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a quick example. Business in town happened to be talking to them simple harassment by phone issue. An unhappy customer calls into their business and I happened to hear a pretty horrific voicemail that was left and a live call that was left. They recorded that and I got to tell you the customer service rep did a fantastic job and just said I'm sorry this call is going to end. You know, call back at another time when your emotions are in check and we'll be happy to help you then.
Speaker 1:And that training, you know customer services has evolved a lot. You know, in the last decade probably, and particularly probably in the last four or five years, I think, since COVID, things have been a little bit different. I know my business has changed tremendously and I think that you know you've got to think about that in terms of supporting your staff to prepare for those situations too, Because they're the front lines right.
Speaker 2:Those are the people that they're going to deal with.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely. So let's think about what are some of the most common day kind of business scams or issues. You know day to day if you've got something coming, what you know day to day. If you got something coming in, you know it's Monday, what's going to hit me on Tuesday every week or once a week. What are some of those things that you see, that you guys see a lot and we can help people think about and prepare for Great question.
Speaker 2:I would say you know, monday morning I would expect maybe a phone call or an email saying hey, on Thursday or Friday, around payday, we got that there was an employee that supposedly asked their direct deposit get rerouted to a different bank and somebody in our HR office didn't think much of it and they rerouted that and come to find out it's fictitious or scammer. So we call those business email compromises. Think of it like this Think about your own email address and all you have to do is change one character. The scammers will look at that, they'll exploit that, they'll send emails from that address. A lot of times they'll pirate your logo, your company logo or your brand and say you know this is employee X.
Speaker 2:I'm no longer doing business with Kennebunk Savings. I switched to Bangor Savings. Here's my account number. Please route my next paycheck on payday to go there.
Speaker 1:It's usually not a local bank. Usually it's a pay card somewhere, right.
Speaker 2:It's going to go to a bank account and then get transferred to Green Dot or something like that. A little bit harder to track Business email compromise probably number one.
Speaker 1:So we've seen in our business. We see that a we're an apparel business.
Speaker 1:We've unfortunately seen that happen to a lot of clients. We take a lot of precautions in-house and we educate our clients on that all the time. Please go to paperchillscom and look on the Safety and Security Center, because we talk about this a lot. We've seen, actually, where a lot of clients and employees have had their real email compromised because there's email password compromises across the internet. People use the same password 123 password for everything right, so guess what the hackers? You know that may have been your eBay account that got hacked, but your Gmail account uses the same password. And then gosh, let's try it. See what happens right.
Speaker 2:I read a funny article recently about. It was a statistic. I can't remember what the number was 60% of the emails out there has their pet's name somewhere in it Not too hard to find what my pet's name is. Absolutely. I mean not social engineering. Yeah, it happens right.
Speaker 1:And these guys are smart and it doesn't usually take too long to dig down the rabbit hole and find that. So their actual email has been compromised and they're sending an email from the legit Gmail account or business account because that organization, that individual, isn't using multi-factor authentication.
Speaker 2:Yep Right, and the login should tell them hey, somebody logged in. Yeah, as you here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every email, everything now, unfortunately, probably should have multi-factor authentication with a text code or an authenticator app or face ID or something Right? Yep, we preach that hard, right? And my staff screams at me every day. It's a pain in the ass. We know it is that text code every day, every time you log into something, or the authenticator. But really nowadays you have to have it because things are so crazy out there.
Speaker 2:What's the alternative? That you don't have it, and you make it that much easier for the scammer Right and you lose the money, and I mean it's not honest to God.
Speaker 1:it's not J paper trails in maine, right, and our little old clients all over the place, right? It's not yep that, and unfortunately that's who they're going after, because we are the trusting mainers right, right, I've said that already.
Speaker 2:Very safe up here, right, and I think they know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, you know, gosh, the guys in new york, they're, they don't care, you know, or they have better controls in place, better, it's harder to get stuff out of them, uh, than it is out of the small businesses. Right, that's very true. So any other common types of scams or things that you see that businesses need to be paying attention to?
Speaker 2:The phishing. Phishing is very popular, where they'll just blast out emails and they're seeking information, insider information, so that could help them run a different scam. The big one is the payroll. We see that a lot.
Speaker 1:And the hard thing about those is there's really not a whole lot you guys can do about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, not really. And the other thing is that money just doesn't go from one place to another. So every hop, think of it. Every hop is a new subpoena.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And you've got to wait. That's not fast.
Speaker 1:Right, and they know this.
Speaker 2:Right, right and so by the time and nowadays, with cryptocurrency, you know, $10,000 comes out of small business A and by the end of the day, it's changed into Bitcoin, it's changed into Ethereum and it's gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know other ways to trace and track those transactions? Yes, but as soon as they leave the country, that becomes a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it's really crazy that we have to think about that in this day and age, but it's more and more prevalent. We're seeing it. Certainly you guys are seeing it and I'm sure you feel like you're spinning your wheels a lot or saying, hey, I'm sorry, I can't do anything about that.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times too, it's not even. It's like we talked about earlier is that the victim Wasn't just a victim by chance. The victim did certain things at the direction of the scammer to make this a success for them.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and you know we talked a lot about this phishing and vishing and vishing is the other voice, phishing- right.
Speaker 1:Right, that's another one. So we train our staff every quarter, right? So we have a software called Know Before we educate. Every quarter, our team takes 15, 20 minutes worth of training on some sort of cybersecurity, information security, phishing, vishing, whatever. I have beat them upside the head 47 ways to Sunday so that they pay attention to these things. Not only do the training, we test them right. So at some point throughout the quarter they're going to get a phishing email. And they look good, the company does a good job, right, and they either. You know, if they click on the link and they're like you failed, you failed, we get them.
Speaker 2:Our IT department in town just sends them.
Speaker 1:And now we've started using the vishing training and that's been really good too, because you know we, everyone thinks about you know the emails, right, that's a faceless kind of thing, but once you pick up the phone and there's someone at the other end, now it's, it's become personal.
Speaker 2:And they know certain things. Yeah, they know little bits about your company, who your people are.
Speaker 1:They sound real good, that stuff's not too hard to get right Right.
Speaker 2:If you went on company A's website and it said meet our staff, and you have all the staff profiles.
Speaker 1:Right, you say, hey, I was just talking to so-and-so, right, you know, correct, it's not hard for that kind of stuff to protect yourself, your business, your customers.
Speaker 2:The other thing too I think about. I try to narrow it down for people. If you're not expecting a check in the mail. Question it. If you get an email from somebody and the email doesn't look right or the address that it's coming from doesn't look right, you should question that. If someone says, hey, I'm following up from a phone call we had last week and you didn't have a phone call last week, you should question that Even.
Speaker 1:I mean, we've had you know, my family owns a restaurant We've had people call and say hey, we want to do a catering event for this many people. You know, it's usually like a really good event. You know, I want all this fancy stuff and you're going to do this deposit, or I want to send you a deposit, right. Well, how often does that actually happen, right? The customer is like so excited to pay you a $5,000 deposit, you know.
Speaker 2:And how many wires do they really get?
Speaker 1:Right, how many?
Speaker 2:wires, do small businesses get right? And, by the way, if they ever tell you to go to your local Walgreens, cvs, hannaford and buy gift cards the red light should be going off right.
Speaker 1:And should be going off, right yeah, and if they call and they want the code off the back, definitely stop it right there, yeah. So I mean these guys are certainly good, but you've got to protect yourself. And I you know, in your business, in your life and I know you know, in my previous world I was a banker and I know, you know, I've heard the stories of you know, grandma comes in and says, oh, my grandson is in Taiwan and on vacation and they got kidnapped and I'm wearing them $10,000 to get unkidnapped, or they lost their plane tickets or whatever. And of course grandma wants to help little Johnny get home.
Speaker 1:And even those types of things.
Speaker 2:Oh, happens all the time. We had four last fall here, ai, when the scammers called, the voice that they generated on the other end of that phone call sounded so real that the woman gave a courier the money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a whole new thing, right? I mean, I'm not anywhere near versed enough on that, but what are you guys seeing? How are you guys seeing the AI stuff change, how crimes happen? Right, I think it's probably still a little new.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's still new. I think it may become more and more frequent, with more success on the bad guy's end.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So just because you hear a familiar voice on the other end of the phone, you should maybe question is it really?
Speaker 1:Or call your grandson's phone, right, Like hey, you know the real number, right If it comes from a weird number, right.
Speaker 2:Or the other thing. They spoof everything. Someone says, hey, it looked just like my grandson's phone number and I answered it and it sounded just like him on the other end and he said there was going to be a guy coming to my house or my business and I needed to give him cash or gold bars. I mean, it's never ending.
Speaker 1:The scams, the scammers yeah.
Speaker 2:Protect yourself and protect your business. Absolutely. Yeah, that.
Speaker 1:AI stuff is kind of crazy and scary. Certainly we're all still learning about that and trying to figure that out, so I'll be interested to see how that changes your role Right More difficult. So you know, one of the things that we're very fortunate about in our community is certainly you guys, our department here. You guys are really good at community policing, right yeah, we try. And education, just like this, right. What can businesses do to take advantage of that kind of relationship, assuming that their police departments?
Speaker 2:are just as good, right. Hopefully they all are right, in my view. You just said the key word Relationships. How did you know to reach out to me to do this podcast today? Because we have a relationship. I know who you are as a business owner and as a resident in town and you know who I am. Just use those relationships we're here.
Speaker 2:When I think of community policing, it's not like one thing that you do, it's a way you do it, it's the way you conduct business and I look at us like a business and we're providing service customer service to witnesses, victims, residents, visitors, business owners and that relationship you know. Hey, I want to know how do I make my business a little bit better? You know I'm thinking of doing business with the ABC Lock Company. Have you ever had any problems with them? Call us and use us as a resource. We're always happy to you know, help you in any way we can. We've done talks for small business different small businesses in town the Chamber of Commerce, the Center, the elderly center down in Lower Village, high schools, colleges so yeah, if you ever need any of that, that's the worst we can do is say, geez, we can't fit it in right now right For the most part.
Speaker 1:But you guys are always out and about at community events. You're part of the community. You come walk down Main Street in the summer and say hello to people and introduce yourselves and I know the chief hosts coffee I think once a quarter or something like that and hosts coffee I think once a quarter or something like that. You know, and it's really, and when there is an issue, I mean I never hesitate to reach out. But I know you guys, but you know there's always, you know, a very friendly. There's never a negative connotation.
Speaker 2:And people say a lot of times oh, I don't want to bother you. You know, I say you're not bothering us. I would rather take 10 phone calls from a business owner or resident somebody and say this may be nothing but and then not have them call and have it be something. Why didn't you call us when it happened? Right, I mean, call us, that's what we have.
Speaker 1:I think that's important and certainly, again, it's building that relationship. I know you guys offer the VIPS program, the Volunteers in Police Services. That's what it is, which is a class you do once a year or so, something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do a Citizens Police Academy. We get the bulk of our VIPs from that.
Speaker 1:So through your Citizens Police Academy, you're teaching community members about what you do, how you do it and what they can do to help the police department. Right, Right, that's all really important, and certainly I know we're all busy in our lives and it's like eyes and ears right, it's eyes and ears in the community.
Speaker 2:In town we have a West Kennebunk neighborhood watch, Just a loose group of people who live in the same geographic area, that kind of look out for each other and if something doesn't seem right, not only do they put it on this Facebook page to talk about it, they know to call us or email me and we'll get on it.
Speaker 1:And how has that changed your life? All these Facebook pages.
Speaker 2:I've got to say it can be good, it can be bad. I think the better relationship is, you know, put the information out there, the truthful, accurate information. Give that to the folks out there in social media and try to waylay any of the false stuff that comes up. People, the imagination runs wild sometimes.
Speaker 1:Indeed it does. I read those posts and I'm like, oh my goodness, these people need a hobby. Yeah, no comment, you're not allowed to comment.
Speaker 1:I can comment, you can't comment so good, so let's just go back. You know, I think for me one of the things that we talk about a lot on the podcast is these are things that we probably all should be doing as business owners but we aren't, because we get busy running our businesses and dealing with our employees and customers and making sales and, and you know, dealing with all that stuff. But going back to basics, you know locks, lighting, cameras, you know just the basic stuff, right.
Speaker 1:And think about a plan God forbid something bad happens, right, those are pretty basic things and then always be looking out for the scams and and and don't be afraid of the police department, right? I mean no, I think you know, unfortunately, over the last decade or so, I think it's been really hard to be a police officer and I certainly appreciate everything you guys do. We know that and I think it's definitely, but 99.99999% of police officers in this country are fantastic people and they just really care about the community.
Speaker 2:And I think, if you asked from coast to coast, north to south, the bulk of us why we got in this job is to help people, help residents, help business owners, help kids, adults, elderly. It's not we want to get out here and do anything bad. We want to just help people, of course, and the media doesn't help and things like that. But we've got to keep chugging forward.
Speaker 1:Well, good. We've hit some really good topics today, so I really appreciate that. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to get in touch with you if they have questions?
Speaker 2:Easiest way is my email. It's sborst B-O-R-S-T at kennybunkmain. All spelt out us.
Speaker 1:Perfect, and of course the Kenyon Police Department is on Instagram and Facebook and they're really good with a lot of that outreach and preparation. No-transcript, you can always reach out to us. We'll get them off to Steve or to any of our guests. Just podcast at papertrailscom. But we will be back next week for another very exciting episode. No-transcript does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific individual organization, product or service.
