If you run or work in a small business, you have to make frequent choices whether to trust your good customers or protect yourself from the occasional bad apple. When in doubt, go with the trust.
We leave copies of many of our materials on our waiting room table so potential new customers can look them over before their introductory appointments. Yes, they could lift them from our office without enrolling. But the benefit of trusting people outweighs that of expecting the worst and locking up the goods. So far, we have had exactly zero incidents of petty materials theft. But if we ever do, it will have been worth the risk.
When we launched our online store with downloadable products people could save to their computers, we considered how we could prevent people from downloading something and then immediately asking for their money back just to cheat us. Sure, we could have a “No refunds, no exceptions,” policy. But we decided we didn’t need to protect ourselves from something that hadn’t happened yet. Our store has been open for one year, and we’ve had only one request for a refund, which we happily processed. A “no refunds” policy would have told anyone shopping on our site that we shouldn’t trust each other. And it would have only saved us $12.99. Not worth it.
In the thirteen years I’ve run Collegewise, I can think of only about five instances where someone just deliberately took advantage of us (I was happy to refund their money and send them on their way). Those kinds of customers are anomalies. We could have protected ourselves preventatively or reactively with new policies, but that would have punished the wrong people.
If you’re a private counselor or another kind of small business owner, rather than making policies, procedures, forms, or fine print to protect yourself from the occasional bad apple, let yourself get burned every now and then. The goodwill you’ll build with the right customers will far outweigh the brief pain you'll feel from a few burns.
[I just saw that Seth wrote about this topic today, too. Wish I'd gotten there first, but at least I'm aping the right people]