Don’t Let Spills Burn Your Profits
An accidental hot beverage spill and burn can cause a great deal of damage, to customers, business reputations, and financial stability. Spill and burns can be prevented through staff training, and careful practices, as outlined in our books, Handling Hot Beverages, Coffee: Too Hot to Handle, or Mishandled? and hot beverage safety poster, but today, we’ll look at these incidents from a business perspective.
Hot beverage spills and the resulting burns start a chain reaction of pain, suffering, and hardship for the injured and the business owner. Consider all the resources required to defend your business in a lawsuit, including your time, legal fees, and court costs. The stress and distraction will impact your life and your livelihood.
Spills and Burns will cost your business in a few major ways.
Revenue and Profits
Most business’ first concern will be their bottom line. Defending against a lawsuit comes with a number of costs, that can burn away at your business’ profits. Whether you win, settle, or lose, you must pay for your own defense. The cost of research and expense for never-ending meetings and depositions, and make decisions can all add up to your defenses cost.
Trials can add different, and larger costs. These are lawyer fees, research, travel expenses, time, stress, court fees, and damages or settlement charges.
The choice comes down to: fighting to defend your business, or to settle with the plaintiff. Settlements may mean an overall decrease in overall cost without admitting fault, but you’re unable to defend yourself from public opinion.
Day to Day Distractions
A formal complaint can stop your business’ day to day operations in its tracks. After receiving a complaint, you must respond in a timely manner, which can include contacting lawyers, and insurance companies.
Preparing for your defense, you must track down current and former employees, locate incident reports, and video surveillance, find old equipment, and maintenance logs.
These are all an expensive distraction from your responsibilities of operating your business every day. Managing the stress and emotions of both your business, and the lawsuit can place strain, and disrupt the monitoring and management of your business. This can affect everyone in your business, including management and employees, and prevent you from acting on opportunities for your business and employees.
Bad Publicity
It is likely that your business, and the lawsuit, will be featured in local news, and on social media. Media stories of injured customers attract attention and views, which shapes public opinion. Whether there are unresolved facts, or the details had not been examined, matters little to media outlets reporting the story. Completing interviews to defend your business, or stop misinformation may do more harm than good, when done without proper media coaching.
It can be difficult to recover from poor publicity, particularly for small businesses without the backing of PR departments, or media management companies.
Stop Spills Before They Happen
When considering the cost of a possible lawsuit, the best way to avoid cost, is to prevent spills in the first place.
Dan Cox & Associates are advocates of hot beverage best practices, along with clear warning labels, and hot beverage training for employees.
We’ve created hot beverage safety poster. Our founder and President, coffee industry luminary Daniel Cox has written two comprehensive books on hot beverage spills and burns. Both are designed to educate restaurant and food service businesses on maintaining high quality standards for hot beverages, safely serve hot beverages, and protect themselves from liability should a spill or burn occur.
Call today to learn more about the best way to protect your business from lawsuits and bolster your case at (802) 799 2235.
