A Fire Alarm System Is Crucial To Your Business. Here’s Why!
As a business owner, you want to do everything that you can to protect your property, your staff, your customers and your livelihood and ensuring that your business is fully equipped with a high-quality, working fire alarm system is one very important part of this.
Perhaps you have an older fire alarm system that came with the building or are yet to run a full check on the working quality or your alarm system – or maybe you have yet to install one. In any case, you may be leaving your business and livelihood at risk.
Here are just a few reasons why a fire alarm system is crucial to your business.
Protect Your Customers
If your business is a public-facing one – such as a bar, cafe, restaurant, store, etc. – then it’s imperative that you have a working fire alarm system in order to keep members of the public safe while they visit.
In many retail and hospitality settings, sounds can be drowned out by the chatter of customers or music playing over the speaker system. If your fire alarm system isn’t up to date or working at its best capacity, can you really trust everyone to hear the alarm in the care of a fire?
If a fire were to break out during a busy period at your business – imagine a busy Friday evening in a restaurant or Saturday morning shoppers descending on a popular independent store – you would have to rely on the sound of your fire alarm system to ensure that all customers hear the warning and evacuate to safety.
As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to keep your customers safe – make sure that a faulty fire alarm doesn’t stop you from doing this.
Protect Your Team
No business can keep running without its team, working hard each day to keep things ticking over.
Whether your team are working at a desk, behind a bar or in a kitchen, they have plenty to be getting on with during the day and are unlikely to be aware of their surroundings at every second – if something was to happen, they would need to be alerted.
Not to mention that, in the event of a fire, your team will take on much of the responsibility of getting customers out to safety – ensure that they have the time to prepare and to do this by giving them the means to identify a risk as soon as there is one.
Everyone has the right to feel safe while they work and the minimum expectation of any team is that their employer will do what they can to keep them from harm while they work.
Protect Your Business Around The Clock
Fires don’t adhere to a schedule – they can break out at any time.
Almost a third of all workplace fires are started due to an electrical fault, something which could happen at any time of day or night. Once you have locked up and headed home for the evening, you probably aren’t worrying about a fire starting at your business, but if one were to break out due to an electrical fault, wouldn’t you want to know as soon as possible?
Not only is it important that you are able to alert authorities and have firefighters on the team quickly in order to limit the damage to your business, but a fire alarm system will alert those who may live or work in buildings in the immediate area, allowing all those inside to get to safety.
As a business owner, you’re never truly off the clock – but a high-quality fire alarm system will give you the peace of mind that at least one risk to your business is taken care of.
It’s The Law
According to UK Fire Safety Regulations, you are legally required to have a fire alarm system installed within your business if the business meets one or more of the following conditions:
- The business property is large, multi-storey or includes multiple rooms (including floor-to-ceiling fitting rooms)
- You store high-risk substances such as paint and chemicals anywhere on the premises
- You undertake high-risk activities involving an open flame – cooking, for instance.
- A fire could not be easily spotted if it broke out in any area of the property.
In the vast majority of cases, your business property will fall into at least one of these categories and is therefore legally required to be fitted with an appropriate alarm system.
You, the business owner, have a duty of care to have the necessary systems in place to protect your property, team and customers – and the law reflects this.
Need A Fire Alarm System Installed? Call On Us.
At Safe & Sound, we have over 40 years experience working in fire safety to keep customers, business owners and employees safe.
Whether you need your current fire alarm system checking or need an entirely new system installed, we have the skills and knowledge necessary to ensure that your business is fire-safe.
We believe that everyone deserves to feel safe from the risk of fire and put our customers at the centre of everything that we do. For more information on our company, our mission or our services, please feel free to get in touch – let’s keep you safe and sound.
