Are you building policies from fear or from experience?

A lot of our policies were written after something went wrong.

I’ve been bitten by dogs twice. I’ve also had employees put in unsafe situations because a client was negligent about securing their dog.

At some point, you stop treating those situations as one-offs.

We now have much firmer rules around aggressive dogs, access, and when a technician leaves a property.

If a dog is acting aggressively, we leave. If the customer can’t confirm an aggressive dog is secured, we don’t enter. I’ve had to fire clients over it.

That’s where I think policies get tricky. You don’t want one bad experience to make the business rigid about everything.

But when the same risk keeps showing up, protecting the team has to come before avoiding an uncomfortable conversation with the customer.

Good policies should come from patterns, not panic.

What policy in your business exists because you learned the lesson the hard way?