Something was going on with our office manager.

We knew something was wrong, but we couldn’t pinpoint anything specific.

Now, my brother and I always want to help our employees out when they’ve got stuff going on. We knew she was dating a guy that wasn’t right, doing things that weren’t like her, and just generally seemed troubled.

But instead of really figuring it out, we just kind of let it go, because we were afraid we’d lose this office manager who was in charge of so much in our business…

Have you ever started seeing red flags with an employee but just didn’t feel like you could face having to hire and train somebody new?

We were so afraid of losing her that we turned a blind eye to our office manager’s troubles.

She ended up embezzling about $38K from us.

We found out when our employees got their W-2s to do their taxes.

Our office manager was doing payroll. Each pay period, she would pay each employee a little more than they’d actually earned, but she’d set things up so those extra funds would be direct-deposited into her account.

We were so afraid of losing what we knew was a troubled employee that we unknowingly allowed her to steal more and more money from us.

I’ve seen this multiple times as I’ve worked with pawnbrokers across the country. They’re so afraid of losing an employee – so afraid of not being able to find somebody who could do the same thing – that they put themselves in a position where they lose money and harm their business.

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, I’m guessing you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You’re busy, and taking the time to really sit down with an employee and have those conversations can seem daunting. (If you could use a little help in that area, check out episode 63 of the Pawn Leaders Podcast: How to have difficult conversations with your staff.)

But in the end, it’s your bottom line that’s on the line. The buck has to stop here.

Have you ever had this problem? Have you let things slide with a troubled employee because

you didn’t want to deal with the hassle of finding someone to replace them? Hit reply and tell me how it affected your business – and what you did to prevent it from ever happening again.

You’ve got this,

Yigal