Loose lips Sink Ships Shhhhhhh !

By Leon Levy
Klingshield Johannesburg South Africa 13th January 2012

Keep it quiet. Revealing trade secrets can cost you business.

Think about what is going on inside your company that you don't want outsiders to know about -the information that gives your company the competitive edge. Now think about the value of this information and what you could lose if it were taken by a former employer or somehow lost to former employers and taken to competitors. Believe you me I have seen this happen to our company many, many times. Lumar head hunted our staff when they started out and so did Auto Armour and if it was not for our company they would not be in the window film business today!

Anyhow cowboys don't cry in front of their horses and our company will always be the leader in the industry as long as I am alive. We all learn from our mistakes and in today's world all new staff members in management have to sign restraint of trade contracts to protect us of our valuable intellectual property .

We have also learnt that when we have a visitor at our offices we run all meetings in our meeting area and not inside an office as there is always information around that could be exposed for outsiders to see.

With the introduction of the Internet today most of your company’s imformation and marketing tricks are exposed and that is one of the risks associated with the internet. However, the advantages outweigh the risk of exposing yourself to the competitors. But if you want to be rated by Google one needs to put as much information on one’s web site as possible for your potential clients to see .

Unfortunately it is a two sided story, but the positives outweigh the negatives so one needs to run the exposure road. The good thing is that it is an even playing field as the competitors are also exposed if they want to be a main player on the Internet, and no company can afford not to have a website and be exposed on the Internet in today’s times and market place .

The first step in protecting intangible assets is understanding what they are. In my opinion it is the way the business, it's systems and balances work. It takes years to develop procedures and it costs time and money to gaining experience. We have some unique systems in our business which keep us ahead of our competitors. However it's no good having checks and balances if we don't have the right people to make the checks. The leader of any company sets the pace and the examples on how to lead the way in keeping systems strict and methodical.

Not protecting your trade secrets is almost an invitation to people to take them from you. But never fear as at Klingshield we have tricks up our sleeves that we have in reserve. What we have forgotten about this business our competitors still have to learn and one cannot hold a Rotweiller back.

How will they ever catch up to us. We are light years ahead of them and we have lots of ideas under our hat.

For more information please contact us.