Employee Theft Was Best Thing to Happen to Me

author: Lee Buttolph

Yes, you heard me correctly.  An employee stealing money from our family business was the best thing that every happened to the company.

While I won't get into all the details, the employee was responsible for the A/R, A/P, check writing, ERP order entry of the business.  This employee had been with our company for a long time and we had relied on that person to "take care of it."

So why was it so great?  We had stopped learning about our back office process because this employee was responsible for it.  While we knew the big picture of what that person was doing we didn't know the finer points.

After that employee was terminated we decided not to hire another person to fill those roles and we decided to do it ourselves.  It took a while but we dived into the weeds and started to learn the process.  

We got to learn the actual number of the business.  Instead of seeing summary reports and Income Statements or Balance Sheets we got to see EVERY invoice, EVERY purchase order, EVERY bill, EVERY bank statement, etc.  You start to learn trends, get a feeling for the poorly paying customers, which suppliers are sticklers on payment terms, etc.

So yes, this theft was the best thing that ever happened to our company.  Our business came out much stronger on the back side.