Nowadays, stealing data is commonplace and anyone can become a victim at any time. The person standing in line behind you might be running a profitable side business stealing other peoples’ sensitive data. The reality is, however, that “inside” jobs are most common when discussing business data theft.

Instead of looking through crowds trying to pick out law breakers, and instead of spending boatloads of money conducting thorough background checks on all those whom you encounter in your business, it’s easier to simply protect your data from prying eyes and malicious intentions.

Easier, yes. But protecting company data isn’t something that many small business owners do. Into their computer programs they input their products and pricing, their vendors, their EINs and TINs, their checking account numbers, email addresses of family members, their proprietary information, their marketing plans and formulas – everything goes into computer.

What’s worse is when a business owner stores this type of information on a laptop computer, an item especially vulnerable to theft. Someone stealing laptops probably could care less about information that is stored on them, but why take that risk. If you’re going to protect your sensitive company data, it’s all or nothing.

And protecting data is definitely your responsibility if you are an accountant or you specialize in other types of financial businesses. Your clients assume you are protecting their financial documents and their other sensitive records. But are you? Kudos to you, if you are. If you are not, you better take this issue seriously right now, before damage occurs.

The Gallup Organization has studied thousands of companies and surveyed millions of employees. Their research has shown that very few employees are engaged and that a relatively small increase in amount of engaged workers can reap great benefits for a company.

At lowest level, engaged employees help a company stay in business and at a higher level employees start thinking about how they can improve themselves. They can take some ownership over their job; and also over their own development. It starts people thinking in new and different ways about things they do.