When you think about thieves, you might think about shady characters who physically break into your office and take product or equipment, leaving behind a horrible mess.

Unfortunately, most business theft doesn’t happen that way. It’s invisible, carried out by the employees and vendors you trust with your most intimate and private information.

What is The Ugly Truth About Cash About?

In The Ugly Truth About Cash: 50 Ways Employees and Vendors Can Steal From You and What You Can Do About It, Ruth King exposes the hidden side of business theft that will open your eyes and have you running through your bank statements with a fine-toothed comb.

The book reads like it could be one of those docudramas you see on television where they juxtapose real people with re-enactors to tell a story. It’s like a train wreck. You don’t want to look, but you can’t help it.

The book is divided up into two main sections:

Part One contains story after true story from business owners who had learned about theft the hard way. They lived through it! You’ll also learn what they did about it to keep their businesses afloat.

Part Two is much shorter and provides small business owners with a few reports and guidelines on how to prevent theft, report theft and what procedures to put in place.

At the end of each story, the author shares lessons and then a company procedure that you can implement to protect yourself.

King has experiences writing about employee theft. Her first book “21 Ways to Keep Your Honest Employees Honest” cemented her reputation for helping small businesses control this potentially devastating problem. Over the past 25 years, she has owned seven businesses and she’s consulted with hundreds of small businesses about how to grow to the next level of success.

What Was Best About The Ugly Truth About Cash?

I don’t often get emotional over the books I read, but this one absolutely put a lump in my throat from the opening pages with King’s personal story of theft in her father’s law firm.

Don’t think badly of me, but at first, I wasn’t excited about reading a bunch of personal stories about people who experienced theft. “Learn your lesson, do better next time”, I thought. And then story after story left me with such a feeling of profound sadness for the business owner and eventually for some of the folks who were stealing that I couldn’t put the book down.

Pay special attention to the end of the book where King shares a summary of procedures to put in place. This is a really useful section you can use as a checklist for what new policies and procedures you’ll put in place.

The very end of the book contains a message to embezzlers that I absolutely love:

“Revealing your practices in this book will force you to be even more diabolically creative in your theft. I hope you can’t figure out another way to steal, but if you do, I will hear about it and write a sequel to this book revealing the new ways you have found to steal.”

Why Read The Ugly Truth About Cash?

No matter what type of small business you own, theft is a reality. While you can’t do everything, you have to hire people you trust. Reading this book, while sad and difficult, will help you hire the right people and put the right systems in place before you lose it all.

This article, “The Ugly Truth About Cash Sheds Light on How Employees Steal – and How You Can Stop It!” was first published on Small Business Trends