Large vs. Small Paper Shredding Companies

When someone is running a corporation, it is natural for them to feel distant from issues that are hundreds or thousands of miles away from their headquarters. Their actions could be causing harm to the environment, employing unfair labor conditions or making a popular local playground a dangerous place to walk to because of increased truck traffic. None of these things register personally with the CEO, because they cannot personally relate to this hardship and how it mars your local community.

With smaller businesses, every little detail matters. Rather than encouraging trucks to speed through residential areas for greater efficiency, or expect skilled workers to accept lower pay when they deserve better, they tend to feel the empathy that comes with having an emotional and social investment in their own community. Supporting small document security businesses like these not only ensures that every person matters, including yourself and your needs, but you are also preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands with the same level of care that any large business could provide.

At the same time, you are helping someone’s daughter afford that trip to her music performance in another state. You are helping someone else’s mother afford the at-home care they need. You are also helping sons and daughters go to college to grow up and represent the community they came from with pride. You are more likely to know the names and faces of the business owners and their children, standing side-by-side with them at Rotary Club meetings, school plays or local fundraisers.

By staying local, you make all of these things happen in your own town as opposed to funding executive lifestyles in another state. You also do not give up a shred of quality in the service you receive. In fact, you are gaining some advantages over large companies. Here are just some of the benefits you can get from going with a smaller, more community-focused document destruction company:

More Resources, More Dependability

The cumbersome infrastructure of larger companies can make them inconsistent or even undependable.

Smaller firms know that every client matters, so they know they cannot afford to neglect sending you out a truck at your appointed time when while they have other clients to juggle. Even when times are tough, they never forsake the clients they know by name. A small business owner is no stranger to staying up late at night sifting through invoices or work schedules trying to pull everything together to keep their clients satisfied, whereas a manager at a larger corporate chain might just punch the clock and be done with it.

Bigger document shredding companies may sacrifice this level of service when business does not go according to plan. They can often lose sight of what is needed to deliver dependable services to clients and hire the right staff needed to maintain the expected quality. For these reasons, service does not always improve as companies scale, despite them adding even more resources like trucks and shredding machines to their fleet.

More Reputation at Stake

Word gets around fast in the business world, but on a national scale, bad decisions may not always come back to haunt the company. A wrong hire or a normally-cordial employee who had a bad day and lashed out at a customer can often be the least of their problems.

With smaller document destruction companies, every client matters. A bad experience by someone in Atlanta can come around to everyone in the metro area. Suddenly, new clients are suspicious of the level of service you can deliver and old clients are reconsidering their contracts. More is riding on the line for small document shredding companies to follow through on the high expectations set by the relationships they build at the community level.

Expert Compliance

Going back to a cumbersome bureaucratic structure, larger document shredding company managers may not feel compelled follow through with certifying each employee on document security best practices. These knowledge gaps may seem innocent, but for regulations like HIPAA, breaches in protected personal information can have serious consequences for the business that who was supposed to protect that information — not necessarily the document shredding company who handled it last.

The work of local fraudsters stealing personal information from Atlanta area college students just two years ago illustrates the lengths criminals will go to in order to obtain data. Without knowledge of procedures and compliance with regulations, a shredding company can put countless people at risk.

Entrusting a document destruction company that has the ability to obtain HIPAA compliance certification and the transparency of standards like ISO 9001 can prevent information leaks from happening and give you the peace of mind that comes with it. Unlike larger companies, they are familiar enough with day-to-day operations and every individual employee to the point where they can have much better oversight on whether required practices are being followed.

As larger document security companies get even larger due to mergers and acquisitions, client satisfaction has declined while business risks have increased. So go local and small when choosing a certified document shredding service to benefit not just yourself or for that business, but your local community as a whole.