Basically there are two ways to safeguard our livelihoods and protect America’s most precious resource today, her nearly 30 million small businesses.
One is to adopt a cheerful, welcoming, open-door attitude toward potential customers. I call it the friendly, open arms, optimistic Laurel way.
The other is to take heavy Hardy’s suspicious stance, staying always on guard, nervously attaching locks and tightening security screws. I call this the fraidy-cat approach, leading to a negative, suspicious outlook toward all visitors.
“Who goes there? Friend or foe? Watch out for our pit bulls.”
A friend in the security guard business told me the other day I was crazy to keep the front door of our PR firm, TransMedia Group, unlocked during the day as anyone could just walk right in.
“And what’s wrong with that? I responded. “Aren’t we in business? Are we not located in tony Boca Raton, right across from City Hall? Don’t we want people to walk in? Aren’t we one of America’s small businesses that employ about 120 million people?”
Be careful, says my concealed-weapon-carrying security friend. In his mind, if a business isn’t tightly locked down and secured, it’s doomed to be attacked and robbed, its products pillaged and female employees raped.
It’s even more endangered in a downtown commercial building which he sees as a sitting duck for miscreants and evildoers.
He proscribes soup-to-nuts surveillance 24/7, including lots of locks. He advocates wrapping a premises in a myriad of security blanket protections, cameras, guards, panic buttons, alarm triggers and combination locks on every door and particularly on doors at main entrances.
In his mind, the most important assets to safeguard are the personnel working on premises, even if it means locking out potential customers.
Safety first! Business last!
A Contrarian View
Personally I’m more in league with open-door Laurel. And just like our President, I believe in Business First. The more profitable we are, the more secure we are.
And I’m with Peter Ticktin, founder of the Global Warming Foundation, who believes the wealthier President Trump makes America, the quicker America will be able to rebound from calamities that will inevitably come from global warming.
This is one of the reasons I’m sure Laurel cheered and Hardy shrugged when President Trump signed the sweeping Republican tax reform bill into law because with profits come more resources, capabilities, jobs and freedom!
While there’s always risks, there’s much more to gain from a smarter “open door policy” than a lock-down nervous Nellie approach.
The easier you make access to a business’s or country’s products and services, the stronger and more secure they’ll both be . . . without locks.
So I vote for fewer restraints to access, which we see as not only anti-business, but antithetical to a healthy and robust economy.
So I ask you. If you were an investor in a business, whom would you rather have running it? Laurel or Hardy?
Please no “a little bit of both” copouts. One or the other, thank you, or I’m afraid I’ll have to lock you out.
Whatever you do, don’t get locked out of the fun of reading my latest book, “Is there enough Brady in Trump to win the inSUPERable BOWL?” available on Amazon.