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Could Some Steal Your Customers?

Recently, a successful telemarketer shared his secret of success with me. He's quite pleased with himself and considers it to be a brilliant idea that demonstrates his drive, his need to win. And, in a way, it is. I consider it cheating, though. What works so well for him? Dumpster-diving his competitors. Going through their trash! Why am I sharing this "dirty" secret with you? He told me that he learned everything about his competitors by digging through their discarded paperwork. I'm not suggesting this is the way to your success, but I want you to look at what you throw away carefully.

Lots of people just crumple phone memos once they're through returning the call and toss them in the trash. He loves finding phone memos. Typically, they'll give him a glimpse of the deal makers and what they're doing. Sure, he's got to wade through a lot of trash before he finds anything really interesting, but he learns what deals his competitors have going on and gets the the phone numbers and the names of the deal makers.

Old bills? He knew where his competitors bought their supplies and how much they paid for them. He knew about the contracts that they had with the just-before-final-copy that got trashed. He had lists of their employees and home phone numbers. And he continues to do this occasionally just to make sure he's in touch with his competition.

Wait a minute, you say, isn't this illegal? In many areas it is not. Once the trash is taken off your premises and put into onto a public street or in an alley, your trash belongs to anyone. The exceptions come only when your local government (in the U.S.) has an ordinance against it. That's more likely to exist if they're concerned about litter spreading than if they're worried about your privacy.

What should you do about this? Shredders are cheap and even a cheap shredder makes it much harder to reassemble your documents. A entry level personal shredder costs as little as $25, though office models that can withstand a lot of use go for $300 or so. Don't forget to have enough shredders available so that people will use them rather than having to wait in line or take an inconvenient walk. (Unless, of course, it's an official part of your office exercise program ;-)

An unethical competitor won't just stop at paper. I know a man in the office machine repair business who go his start when he attended the bankruptcy auction of the company for which he had worked. He bid on a PC and got a great deal--his wife was going to use it in her home business while he job hunted. Turned out that the PC was from the marketing department at the old company and had a list of every account they had on it. Dan thought, that's interesting, then a few days later was talking to another friend who'd also lost a job at the company. They went through the accounts and looked at what the customers had been paying and were able to reconstruct enough information to see that the business would have been really profitable if a crook hadn't been running it and ripping it off. There was no remaining company that would have used the information and the customers were high and dry without a good solution when their office machines broke down. So Dan and his friend dug down into their savings and started their business. It's a success.

What's my point? Well, you've got files on your PCs and when you dispose of them, you want to make sure that they're GONE! No matter how you get rid of your old computers, there's information remaining on them if you've just deleted the files. It's not like erasing words on a sheet of paper because the information is still there after you delete the file. And it can be recovered if someone wants to see what you'd had on it. Before you pass your system on, or sell it off, use Norton SystemWorks (from Symantec, available for under $60) or any other utility program to actually remove deleted files. Then you can be reasonably certain that your competitors won't get the information that is critical to your business.

That is unless you're really doing something that big budgets really want. The U.S. military actually shreds the platters of their hard disks because physicists in a well equipped laboratory can do a fine job of reconstructing faint magnetic traces.

Transferring sensitive data across the net? You may want to encrypt it. PGP is a free program (stands for Pretty Good Privacy) that will enable the people you're sending information to decode, but it will take a high level of resources and time for anyone else to break it. Good and cheap--in my book, this is a great solution for small businesses.

There you have it. It's easy for someone to steal your secrets if you don't think they're worth protecting. It's hard for them to do it if you take some commonsense steps to prevent problems. When deciding whether something is worth protecting when you discard it or transmit it, think about what impact it might have if it were instead placed, with a pretty ribbon, on your competitor's desk.