1. Audit your safe and firearms every month.  Theft is an unfortunate reality in our business.  Lots of cash, jewelry and firearms creates lots of theft opportunities.  Create a regular but random schedule to verify jewelry loans/layaways (you should open a few envelopes as well to insure it’s not a bag of paper clips – yes that has happened) and make sure guns are accounted for and serial numbers are correct.  Having a good track record with ATF is important.

2. Daily Jewelry and Gun Counts.  Again, seems obvious, doesn’t it?  Of course, I count my jewelry every day!  But are you doing it right?  Is it the same person counting every day, morning and night?  Are you independently verifying the counts?  Are you switching up the duties?  Get two separate signatures each day, one for opening and one for closing.

3. Manager should be answering the phone. On average, you may receive 50-150 calls a day – which person do you want talking to your customers?  The one who has the best chance (and the most to gain) of helping an existing customer or persuading a new customer to come in.  Put the cordless phone in your manager’s back pocket and leave it there.

4. Walk your pulls/drops every day. Another, less obvious way, theft can occur is during the process of pulling merchandise from pawn to inventory.  Often times the manager will hand another employee a list of pawns and just assumes they all made it to the sales floor.  Are you sure?  You can easily print your list of pulls each day; why not double-check that each item is on the sales floor and not in an employee’s pocket?  Print the list and file in a binder.

5. Re-price your aged inventory. Every day, run a report with all inventory that turned 90 days old.  Physically touch it and either re-price it or re-position it.  Print and keep in a binder. Also, do it for inventory that turned 365 days old.  Same thing.  Re-price to move THAT week.   Print and file.