Foreseeing problems can prevent costly mistakes

About 20 people sat in a basement room at Adelphi University's center in Hauppauge Friday worrying about things that have not happened. But they may happen, and that's the point.

Rick Maher, co-founder of Davis Maher and Associates, human resources consultants in Mount Sinai, told the Long Island chapter of the Association of Contingency Planners that small businesses need to think long and hard about what could happen.

Maher mentioned several events that occurred last year that, he said, might have been prevented with some planning and proper questioning by HR professionals:

Waiters at a well-known Manhattan restaurant stole customers' credit-card numbers.

A trader at a Wall Street financial firm made a bad bet and cost the firm $2 billion.

A small company in Suffolk was unexpectedly visited by state labor department officials demanding to see the payroll. The company was fined for improper record-keeping.

"You can narrow down significantly the odds of these things happening," Maher said. Small companies need to know what records they are required to keep; Wall Street firms need to do a better job of vetting employees, even traders, and the same goes for restaurants hiring waiters. Maher called his talk "Preparing for Human Capital Contingencies," human capital, of course, being people. And people are unpredictable.

Ron Richards, a director at JVKellyGroup, management consultants in Huntington, said the talk was eye-opening. "We often don't think of these things," he said. "People may react in unexpected ways."