Would you think to Circle Check this??

In our book, Trucker Management, we talk about the importance of regularly doing a Small Business Circle Check in your business.

A Circle Check is essentially a brief pause and chance to objectively look at your business space through the same scrutinous eyes of a first-time visitor, rather than with your usual "million-things-on-my-mind-as-I-rush-in-and-out-the-door" eyes. This way, things that might reflect poorly on your business and easily be overlooked amidst the day-to-day rush of things have an opportunity to be noticed, and more importantly, addressed. If some part of your premises is in disrepair or dirty, if your signs and other notices are outdated, or some other "let-down" in your business has occurred, a Circle Check will let you identify and fix it before too many people have the opportunity to see it.

To aid with this, we suggest creating a checklist (or customizing one of the ones we have created), and include on it the different areas of the business space (interior, exterior), viewing things from different angles or viewpoints, etc.. There are a lot of "obvious" things or places to include on your Checklist, but often times, there are aspects of your business which ought to be included in these regular Checks that you might forget about.

One of my favorite ones is your voicemail/phone answering message. Is it current, is it clear? How about your hold music if you use some - I can't tell you how many businesses I have called where the tuning for the hold music has somehow been thrown off whatever station it was set to (yes, with all the available technology, things were still connected to an FM radio), and the caller hears an earful of static. Most business owners won't ever have to listen to their on-hold music or messaging in the course of their daily work, but things like this definitely need to be checked regularly.

However, I came across one the other day for one I hadn't thought of. I received a cash register receipt from a store, dated July 23rd, and the receipt had a printed message that said "Starting on February 15th there will be a change to our returns policy." Kudos for the initial insight to include this warning/notice to customers on the receipt way back in January or February, but that's a message that's more than a little stale by July 23rd. Even if it was still important that this change be communicated on the receipts, the message ought to at least be changed to "Since February 15th, there has been a change to our returns policy.", or something else more current and accurate.

Is your cash register receipt or invoicing documents included on your Circle Check? What else have you forgotten?