Don’t Get Spooked: How to Protect Your Business from Halloween Mischief

Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is now at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood, to commit theft, property damage and make bad choices in your neighborhood.

Halloween — one of the scariest nights of the year for business owners — is coming up. It may be a beloved holiday, but Halloween lives up to its frightening reputation: there are more crime-related insurance claims filed on Halloween than on any other day. Insurance claims typically spike by 24% that day.

So what can you do to make sure that your staff and your business aren’t too haunted by Halloween happenings? The answer isn’t garlic, stakes, or zombie barricades. It’s risk analysis and basic security precautions.

How can you banish risk on the scariest night of the year?

It’s best to start by asking yourself a few basic questions going into Halloween:

• Is your business directly affected by the holiday? (Do you have a retail store that will be engaging in a downtown trick or treat activity, for example.)

• Does your business own any abandoned buildings?

• Are your employees and their families engaging in seasonal activities?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, we have three tips that will help you keep your assets safe from toil and trouble this Halloween:

1. Bust Ghosts with Aggressive Customer Service

If you’re in retail, you’re likely to see some ghoulies and ghosties in your store this Halloween, especially if you’re doing a trick or treating event or just giving out candy. Unfortunately, wherever there are bags, masks and a lot of foot traffic, there’s a chance of property loss. People in costumes might decide to do some light shoplifting, teens might make some bad choices, and you could be left holding the bag.

To prevent this, staff up. Make sure you have plenty of employees on the retail floor, and teach them how to engage in aggressive customer service. This means actively engaging loiterers, asking them questions, offering to help them find anything they’re looking for, and simply putting a spotlight on people who look like they might steal. This approach usually eliminates the threat — shoplifters tend to avoid attention like a vampire avoids the sun.

2. Mischief Night: The Nightmare Before Halloween

The night before Halloween is often more of a worry to businesses than Halloween itself. October 30, called Mischief or Devil’s Night (or Angel’s Night, as the city of Detroit rebranded it in the ‘90s after a string of arson incidents), is usually the time when things go bump in the night: it’s often used as an excuse for vandalism: arson, tagging, egging and other property damage is common.

While there’s very little you can do to prevent a good toilet-papering, you can prevent arson with a fire prevention and detection system that links directly to the fire department so they can get to your site quickly. You can also have cameras in place to catch vandals in the act, and staff on standby to replace broken windows or paint over tags quickly. (When a building is already vandalized, other people don’t feel so bad about adding additional tags or breaking more windows.)

3. Engage in Safe Paranormal Activities

Your employees are your business’s most important assets, so it’s important to do what you can to keep them — and their families — safe both at work and outside of it.

One way to do that is to encourage your employees to drive safely: Halloween means parties for grown-ups and trick-or-treating for families, and cars can cause issues when it comes to both of those activities. Party-goers may drink before getting behind the wheel and risk accidents. Kids, over-excited by Halloween, can forget to look both ways before crossing the street, so it can be helpful to send out basic safety information before letting employees go out to their Halloween plans.

It’s also helpful to remember, if you’re putting out treats at work and at home, that some children suffer from peanut or other allergies, so be sure to offer a variety of treats so everyone can snack safely.

The power of business continuity risk planning compels you!

Remember: The best security plan is one that doesn’t change during a crisis — or a holiday.

In other words, you want to make sure that your business is protected from things like vandalism or theft all the time. Cameras, guards, and fire prevention and detection are important all year, not just one or two nights in October. By using security risk assessment software, you can make sure you understand your sites’ risk year-round. Circadian Risk’s platform shows you exactly the countermeasures you need in place, no matter the risks you face.

Facing spooky risks this Halloween? Schedule your free 15-minute demo to learn more about Circadian Risk.

About the Author

Daniel Young

Founder & Chief Innovation Officer

Daniel has been a security and risk advisor for more than 10 years, and is passionate about helping companies to better understand their risks to undesirable events on a daily basis. Dan previously served as the Regional Bioterrorism Coordinator for District 1 in Michigan, where he was instrumental in preparing communities for catastrophic incidents. He has also acted as the Private Security Liaison for the City of Lansing’s Critical Infrastructure Team, which identified and documented deficiencies in the city’s critical infrastructure.

He is a Co-Founder of the CSO Risk Council, a think tank of seasoned security professionals and thought leaders with extensive experience in managing the physical security and risks of large enterprises consisting of multiple sites and whose mission is to create a better process to develop and share innovative solutions and pertinent information with organizations to improve safety and security risk by providing a forum to discuss best practices and recommendations for specific risk scenarios and to network with other enterprise security professionals.