Ronald Regan had a wonderful saying, "Trust but Verify." This is the motto he lived by when dealing with Cold War Russia. It was a motto that led to the eventual fall of communism across the globe.

This is a motto we live by when dealing with the finances at our AOS managed parks. We trust our park's staff, but we verify they are doing things correctly.

This week we are helping a client who is buying two parks. At both parks, the owners suffered at the hands of staff embezzlement.

Since we watch our clients numbers daily, we catch "odd" behaviors-sadly, many parks do not catch nefarious activity until is it way too late.

When we came upon our second park in one week with this issue, I said to my team, "How does this happen?"

One of my staff quickly replied, "They do not run their parks like a business, but rather as some sort of social club." She could not have been more correct.

The owners of both parks mentioned above looked upon their staff as, "Family," and never reviewed the books each day. This is where AOS takes a different approach. We immediately catch things like ongoing refunds, management credits, and excessive number of cancellations. When we notice oddities, we dig deep to discover the details and verify the legitimacy of the action. This is paramount to running a well oiled machine.

Most owners do not have time to look over the staff's shoulders. They are too busy running their business to run their business. 3rd party mangement companies have the time to dig deep, and pay for themselves by catching such errors or ommissions.

Whether you run your park, or hire 3rd party management-make sure you look at your number daily!