Should you concern yourself with the most recent scams

As a business owner should you concern yourself with the most recent scams?

As business owners, our time is limited, and the time that we do have is dedicated to growing our businesses. The first thing you need to stop and ask yourself is, “Where do you want to spend your time and energy?”

Now, in the defense of business owners who have approached us with this,, when they find out what we do and everything we know then they hear about The CLEAR Business Directory they feel like they are being irresponsible if they are not on top of those scams. It’s kind of like people who watch the news all the time because they want to be informed.

I get it. I do applaud the desire to be informed. A lot of it is where you want to spend your time and energy. Where people get confused is there is a way to be informed and not be paranoid.

Part of it is implementing some sort of process—we call it the due diligence process. Very creative, I know. We do this so you don’t have to be paranoid, and you can be decision-making. What that means is unless there is a decision to be made, you’re not concerning yourself with it. The point in time when you have to make a decision about an opportunity or bringing on a provider or partnering with somebody, you have a process, you know the protocol so you can do it.

It’s like paying taxes. If you know what the tax codes are, you have a CPA you can trust and have done due diligence on, it’s like second nature. It’s on autopilot. You keep track of your finances, you have your books. All of that jut happens. It’s the same with this. When you are solid in your decision-making process, there is no need to be paranoid and no need to be up on all the most recent scams.

You can have somebody that serves as a filter for you that is at the very bottom of that due diligence process. If you’re getting involved with somebody, they are going through that first, second, and third step. That person can serve as that filter so you don’t necessarily have to dive down those rabbit holes. When you start looking at some of these recent scams, it becomes an abyss.

There is a lot of stuff out there. Maybe you have a business where you need to know. Maybe it is your job to be informed about these things. Or maybe that is where you want to spend your time and energy as a business owner. You’re curious about what makes people want to do this and what are some of the things that people are getting away with? Hopefully it’s not because you’re thinking about doing scams. Maybe we’re fueling the fires here.

There are resources that you can use for that.

You can find a lot of these resources on our website, Clearbusinessdirectory.com, on the podcast page, as well as the DIY page. One of the first places you can look at online is usa.gov. There is a load of resources for you to be able to report recent scams.

It has a ton of information about the most recent scams, too. It’s not just a reporting site. Census-related frauds, charity scams, financial fraud, pyramid schemes, you name it, they have it categorized nicely there. You can access that information.

Another site to look at is consumerfraudreporting.org. They are impressive in the information they have compiled, too.

Let’s go back to the original point. Ask yourself what you gain by knowing that information. When we left government and set out to do this, I can tell you that we built Avent-Guard specifically to make sure that we were empowering business owners to make educated and informed decisions.

It’s super easy to be paranoid. We came out of the espionage arena and had to do a de-compress from the constantly looking over our shoulder. It took a lot of time for us to be able to live like normal human beings in the world. It’s just not worth it to start convincing yourself that every time you turn around, somebody is trying to scam you. You’re much better off empowering yourself and having some sort of a process in place so that you’re confident in your decision-making.

Again, people can go to clearbusinessdirectory.com and take a look at the people there. They have been vetted for frauds and scams, so they operate in full transparency. You can click on the profile of the business owner and click on their transparency report so you know exactly who it is you’re getting involved with and if there are any additional questions you need to ask after that point.

You will see weekly interviews with CLEAR Business Directory members so you get more insight into their business and the kinds of questions you should be asking them or people in their industry before you engage someone. That’s essential to point out because these people have already been screened for frauds and scams. It’s a process, but once you set your mind to it and get that developed for your business, it does move very fluidly and is very simple.