Are you allowing good business practices to become watered down.

My Sunday morning ritual is to make breakfast, grab my fully charged laptop and head back to bed for a bit before the girls head to basketball training.  I catch up on blogs, social media and pin all the goodies I've found to Pinterest.

Last Sunday I almost spilt my latte everywhere when I came across a competitor who was not being exactly 'competitor friendly'.  After spewing my rant to my poor husband beside me and with my fingers ready to dial the offending person, my husband starting questioning ME and asked why it had happened.

As it turned out, I'd left my business exposed and not protected. Call it laziness or being too busy, this was a wake call that I needed to take more care.

Many images on The Haby Goddess online store are taken & edited by me.  Part of my branding is beautiful clear images and if a supplier cannot supply these then I take my own.  Now you are never going to stop others using what is not theirs and I'm not even going to try to decipher copyright laws for images online but if had taken a few steps then others can't argue they didn't know! I would also be in my right to then approach them and ask them to remove the images.

I failed to mention any copyright or Creative Commons License on my site, that these images were in fact taken by me not the supplier and are not available for others to use without my permission.  I will not watermark my images as I feel this would spoil the look and feel of The Haby Goddess but upon saving my images I had also failed to include The Haby Goddess in the labeling.  I'm in the process of understanding all the associated rules and then will rectify them within my store.

It's natural to become a little too comfortable and let details slide. Some tasks are so mundane that over time we start to eliminate them from our routines altogether. Sometimes if we don't fully understand the rules it's easier just to ignore it.  It's not until we have a problem that we realise the importance of them.

I now have a renewed energy for these tasks as I can see their purpose.

Do you have business practices that are becoming watered down?