You manage a company that has a broader reach, a much bigger team, and serves a greater purpose. The beauty of working with a larger group of employees is that you can direct resources to areas that accelerate business performance. However, the success of a growing business is directly dependent on the level of accountability of all stakeholders.
Your company can succeed when you and your associates are clear on the vision and diligent in your checks and balances. Conversely, the lack of responsible care in your business could easily lead you to falter, experience fraud, or even put your business at risk of losing everything.
That being the case, you want to ensure you have the means to keep oversight at a minimum and accountability at its highest to ensure your business can function at its best. This article will highlight what you need to do to ensure your stakeholders stay committed to the company’s success. Read on to learn more!
Constantly Assess Your Weaknesses
Weaknesses are commonplace in any industry. Under-monitoring machine performance is a common CNC machining weakness. No budget for research and development is a common weakness in food and beverage. Durable plastics can fail prematurely based on material selection. Your systems and applications also have flaws, which are often called vulnerabilities.
One of the best ways to ensure that weaknesses do not interrupt production, even under resource constraints, is to evaluate your weak spots continuously. Every business has vulnerability points within both its external and internal structures. You’ll want to ensure you know your weak points to target them effectively. Modest decreases in downtime and waste result in rapid paybacks and high returns on investment (ROI).
Undergoing periodic assessments is a great way to ensure your business keeps pace with your defined strategy and rate of change. To do this, bring in an assessment team to evaluate your company infrastructure and workflows for problems and weaknesses to ensure your business is reliable.
Untrained employees can add points of failure to your security framework, leaving you open to financial and reputational damages.Incorporate Better Practices in Your Employees
Experienced employees commonly get lazy about your company’s security. The longer your employees have been at your business, the greater their chance of making an error due to their relaxed views on company protocols.
It’s evident that the less emphasis your employees place on company protocol, the more likely a security issue could occur. Business email compromise (BEC) causes financial loss and reputational harm to thousands of businesses each year.
In today’s world, everything is dependent on computers. One critical error is all it could take for a virus or a hacker to enter your system and shut everything down. Beyond the training program that may happen during employee onboarding, having proper security training with employees and leadership members is vital.
Your employees can be your first and most important defense against this issue. The first simple measure is creating complex work passwords not written on a sticky note. Another simple step includes training to avoid downloading files from unknown sources. Understanding never to send sensitive information via email without offline verification is just one thing that could protect your business.
Double Down on MSP Negligence
Accountability and predictability are essential to success. As an executive stakeholder, you are committed to the business. You feel the obligation to make effective decisions. Your team and customers rely upon you.
When you delegate the cyber security protection of your business to an MSP, this decision is prone to problems that can lead to disastrous results. As the MSP fails in its duty to protect your business, this becomes apparent after business disruption events occur.
There are two common reasons why MSPs continue to cause business disruption. It relates to competence and greed.
MSPs not only do a poor job protecting your critical data and systems, but they also do not protect their businesses. Hackers are targeting MSPs and IT outsourcing businesses to attack the service providers’ customers, according to a U.S. Secret Service alert issued June 12, 2020. Threat actors use compromised MSPs to launch cyberattacks against service provider customers. These attacks include point-of-sale (POS) system intrusions, business email compromise (BEC), and ransomware attacks. Insurance companies also validate this alarming trend.
Greed is the second common reason MSPs and IT service providers cause business disruption. You become the vehicle and willing participant in their plans to gain control over your resources. MSP profitability can be significantly enhanced when people buy more stuff they don’t need.
The MSP can also improve its profitability by doing the least work possible. Onboarding new victims faster than exploited businesses leave allows MSPs to scale their bottom line while exposing yours.
Many MSPs are master manipulators who cheat, trick, and persuade business executives into believing things that are not true. They fool people into thinking they perform outstanding work and create value for your business through deception.
The degree to which MSPs succeed in manipulating business executives is understandable. Limited time and understanding can lead to questionable decisions. It is common to see various levels of IT management, such as VP, Director, and Manager, be duped by skillful MSPs. They tell you what you want to hear. MSPs will reassure you that the work performed is to an industry standard and that you are secure.
This scenario of high trust with low accountability and no independent verification leads to exploitation and greed. Many MSPs operate their schemes because administrative, finance, operations, and IT leaders do not know the difference. The lack of verification and protocols combine for deficient safety from interior and exterior threats.
You would not ship products without quality control and testing. Your financials certainly do not escape review. Likewise, the active monitoring of your MSP or IT services provider should be an in-place control. In each example, the focus is on understanding the underlying truth.
Inspectionem Alleviates Oversights by Emphasizing Execution
One thing most businesses emphasize is strategic planning. However, few consider the required metrics and milestones that indicate successful strategy execution. An even smaller number actively track their progress. Knowing what success looks like is necessary for incremental adjustments, killing projects, or pivoting plans to attain outcomes.
Managing a business is more than stating what you plan on doing; you must act on those plans so your business can experience the results. The problem is that MSPs know you lack the skills to assess their performance. If no one in your company knows how to proactively manage your MSP’s performance, this oversight impacts your business.
Many problems result from poor execution, including negligence, missed goals, a lack of knowledge regarding completed tasks, and how projects drain resources. Make sure your team focuses on executing the actions needed to complete initiatives so you can make moves within your business.
Inspectionem allows you to discover gaps in expectations before business disruption events occur. We eliminate blind spots by shining the light into the darkness and helping you gauge the quality of work performed by your MSP about the security of your business.
You might be interested in our team trust-building process that allows executives to determine risk and reward improvements based on cash flow and the desired pace of change.
Let’s Get Your Business Going
With an improved understanding of reducing oversight and boosting accountability, making progress on building up your business with fewer errors is less complicated. That said, accountability is only the tip of the iceberg; you’re going to need to take extra steps to continue growing and expanding your company.
Our mutual purpose is to protect all stakeholders from harm; we are not an MSP.
As a proud supporter of American companies, Certitude Security® is working diligently to inform leaders and facilitate essential asset protection priorities for manufacturers and supply chains throughout the United States.
Problem discussions can be a defining moment in your career. If you are interested in value creation, learn about SPOT-Beam™ by Certitude Security®. We look forward to helping you and your business succeed!