Is your business too small to hire a payroll service, or a cleaning service, or someone to handle HR? If not, it’s not too small to hire a shredding service. Outsourcing some smaller tasks to experts frees up employees to devote their time to the work you want them to be doing. That’s especially important in a small business where employees may already be stretched thin.
But paying someone to do something you could do yourselves is a tough pill to swallow, and it’s not just money that keeps small businesses from using shredding services. In fact, there are four common reasons that small business owners often think they don’t need to hire shredding services – but they’re often wrong.
“We don’t generate a ton of paper waste.”
Maybe your business is mostly digital, or the nature of the work means that you and your employees don’t rely much on paper files. Still, you probably have some paper waste – old customer records, paperwork for old employees, financial statements, and so on. Chances are good that whatever data you do keep on paper, at least some of it is of a sensitive nature. Volume isn’t the only issue here. Even if you only generate 100 pieces of paper a week, each one of them could have a customer’s information or an employee’s personal data on it, so each one must be destroyed.
It’s a common misconception that you only need a shredding service to destroy paper files. That’s just not true. Shredding services have the capability to shred hard drives, ID badges and other devices that store data. Your small business may require little paper, but it almost certainly does use electronic data-storing devices that have to be thoroughly destroyed. No disposal method short of shredding can permanently destroy that data.
“It’s easier to shred things ourselves.”
Maybe your business really doesn’t generate much paper waste. You could have an employee shred it by hand, bit by bit, wasting work time trying to fix jams and disposing of all the shreds. Say an employee spends 10 minutes a day dealing with shredding issues. It doesn’t seem like much, but 50 minutes a week equals more than 40 hours over the course of a year. Can your business afford to have an employee spend an entire work week each year feeding documents into a shredder?
Doing your own secure shredding in-house also requires you to invest thousands of dollars in a commercial shredder because cheap home versions will only shred one page at a time and may not create shreds that are small enough to be unreadable. These machines break down sometimes, so you’ll also have to think about maintenance and replacement costs.
This DIY strategy sounds easier than hiring a shredding service, but going this route means dealing with ongoing shredding hassles.
“We don’t work with top-secret data.”
There’s another element that affects whether you need a shredding service, and it has nothing to do with business size. Massachusetts law requires that any agency or person disposing of records that contain personal information must destroy them in a way that guarantees that information can’t be reconstructed.
Furthermore, state law specifically requires that businesses protect certain information about Massachusetts residents. If your business keeps records that include state residents’ Social Security numbers, ID numbers or financial account numbers, you have a legal obligation to make sure it’s kept private. Trashing or recycling files that have that information isn’t compliant with the law.
“We have a limited budget.”
Once you consider the labor and maintenance costs that you’ll shoulder by doing your shredding in-house, paying for professional shredding services might make the most financial sense for your small business. Of course, not all shredding services are created equal. Budget-conscious customers often make the mistake of hiring mobile shredding companies, assuming it’s cheaper to have a shredding truck come to their location than it would be to work with an off-site company. Those trucks are expensive to run (not to mention noisy) and those costs are passed onto customers.
Using a full-service company like Northeast Data Destruction is often the cheapest option. It’s also the most convenient. We can arrange to pick up everything you need shredded, and our strict security protocols guarantee that your confidential data will be protected until it’s destroyed at our NAID “AAA” Certified facility. We provide locked containers and can pick up materials as needed or on a routine basis. Small businesses love us because no job is too small.
How can Northeast Data Destruction make shredding easier for your small business? Contact us with questions!