In a world buzzing with scam calls and dodgy text messages, Trish Hammond is cutting the cord—literally.
The owner of Truce Media runs the digital marketing agency primarily online, with no phone number listed on the website.
Only trusted clients have her phone number, and she readily fields enquiries through her contact page, and communicates by email.
Trish says she decided to pull the plug on a business phone line due to the avalanche of spam calls she was receiving on a previous business website.
“When your number is listed on a website, the number of spam calls that you get can be overwhelming, “she says.
“So I took the number off and then I cancelled it completely, as I can actually ring clients if I need to discuss a job with them. And they’ve got my private number if I choose to give it to them.
“Otherwise, our business is mostly done online and through Zoom meetings.”
Trish is one of a growing breed of small business owners operating 100 per cent online.
Research commissioned by the government-funded Cyber Wardens program has found that one in five businesses communicates only online with clients and customers.
The Small Business Cyber Security Pulse Check report says conducting business online presents a unique set of cyber security challenges, which small businesses need support to navigate.
But the Truce Media founder says she feels safer, and the move has made a “huge difference”.
“We will get onto people straight away when they contact us, so it hasn’t been a problem for us in terms of our clients,” she says.
The boutique digital marketing company works with aesthetic clinics to enhance their digital presence, with their website promising to “showcase your business in the best light possible”.
Working out of her home office in NSW’s Mullumbimby, she employs staff dotted around Australia and Asia.
“We’re dedicated to making sure clinics have got a tailored digital marketing solution to increase their leads and to elevate their reputation,” she says.
“We’ve been going since 2013, but we’ve evolved over that time. We started off as a blog, and then got into digital marketing, and we’ve also got a podcast.”
She says she loves the flexibility of being a small business owner and determining her own hours.
But cyber threats loom large for the small business owner after a damaging incident on the website she used to run, a directory for plastic surgeons.
“It was about ten years ago and suddenly the website was getting three million views in a minute, it was being bombarded and virtually shut us down,” she says.
“The website was down for a solid couple of weeks, it just disappeared. I thought, ‘Oh no, this is it. Our business is done’. We managed to get someone in to fix it, and I don’t know what happened, but it would have cost us thousands of dollars.”
She has been increasingly concerned about the risk of cyber attacks ever since, after witnessing just how quickly her business could be turned upside down.
Trish recently completed the Cyber Wardens course, and describes it as been useful and eye-opening. She now plans to share the program with her clients and staff.
“I didn’t even know what the meaning of phishing was until I did the course,” she says.
“The first thing I’ll do is get my staff to do it. I will also change all our passwords and introduce a safer way to set and store passwords. We have a password manager and I’m ensuring my team is using it.”
