Revealed: The Biggest Financial Mistake Your Business Can Make

Collaborative Post

shallow focus photo of high voltage sign

Multiple things come to mind when you think of financial business mistakes. Blowing all of your budget on a marketing strategy that yields no results is a fantastic contender - as is spending too much cash on product development, rendering it virtually impossible to make a profit.

Neither of these things even comes close to the biggest financial mistake your business can make: neglecting health & safety.

Not paying attention to health & safety in your business will be a catastrophic mistake the likes of which you may never recover from. With your other financial mistakes, there could be room to maybe claw yourself back from the depths. This isn’t the case when health & safety are concerned - and here’s why.

Bad health & safety can force your business to close

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets the rules regarding workplaces and health & safety. It is illegal to provide employees or customers with an unsafe environment. Your legal obligation (as the business owner) is to ensure your premises are safe and free from as many health risks as possible. If these risks are impossible to 100% prevent, the correct signage and safety measures should be in place.

What happens if you fail your legal obligation and your business is found to be unsafe?

Minor fines are likely to occur for small misdemeanors, but in severe cases, your company can be forced to close. This may be temporary - until you’ve corrected the issues and a health & safety inspector confirms this - but it could also lead to the permanent closure of your business.

What if you can’t correct the problem? Or, what if it takes so long and you end up losing so much money because you’re not getting any customers? Even if you return, your brand image could be so badly damaged that nobody trusts you anymore. All of this comes from bad health & safety practices, and here’s the wild thing, nobody needs to get hurt to see all of these negative financial consequences.

But, what happens if someone does get hurt?

Workplace injuries lead to massive lawsuits

The unwritten rule of running a business is to keep your stress levels as low as possible. Don’t create situations where you’ll be extremely stressed and have to worry about your business surviving. As such, you need to focus on health & safety as neglecting this will lead to workplace injuries and accidents.

An employee can be injured on the job because you don’t have the right safety measures in place. They are legally entitled to sue you in this situation, squeezing as much money from your pockets as possible. Even worse, someone could die in your workplace and their family will be allowed to sue for wrongful death. If either of these scenarios were to happen, you’d be dealing with a cataclysmic brand disaster. It’s so difficult to recover when your business is in the news because someone was seriously injured or died.

Regardless, even if you managed to keep this information hidden from the public, the financial repercussions of a health & safety lawsuit are absurd. You’ve got the compensation to pay, plus the legal fees, and then also the cost of correcting the safety errors that led to the incident.

Take all of this into account and it’s painfully obvious that neglecting health & safety is the biggest financial mistake your business can make. Don’t let it slip by the wayside or be forgotten; ensure you uphold the latest safety standards and can prove to everyone that you’ve gone to great lengths to keep health & safety a top priority.

—End of collaborative post—