LISBON – When your office files are overflowing, and you don’t know which to destroy, “who you gonna call?”

Consider FileBusters.

Like the 1984 movie where heroes saved the day by shrinking and eliminating enemy ghosts, Heather Rideout of Lisbon, owner of FileBusters, offers to shrink and eliminate the overwhelming task of storing, destroying or managing records.

It’s a timely service. New laws require that certain information must be protected when it is discarded by a company or organization. According to the National Association of Information Destruction, different laws govern different types of businesses. Confidential information can be as simple as a customer’s name and address, Rideout said.

“Eighty percent of identity theft is from Dumpster diving,” she said.

While there are companies in the Lewiston/Auburn area that store or shred documents, FileBusters is unique in its offering a complete system of records management, including storage; retrieval; identifying when and how a client’s information is managed; shredding and setting policy.

Rideout plans to add document imaging services this fall.

“Businesses that are dealing with confidential information every day need a secure way to dispose of it,” she said, adding that FileBusters is a member of NAID.

Rideout also offers courier services to her clients. Records can be retrieved and made available 24-7, she said, and clients in the Lewiston-Auburn area can receive their records within three hours.

Rideout first got the idea for a records management company when she and her husband, David, a thoracic surgeon, were faced with the daunting task of closing his Lewiston surgical practice in 2003. They were moving to New Zealand with their three children for a “special family year,” and Rideout could not find a local document storage company that could also manage the files.

“We needed a company to be able to pull a record and get it where it needed to go,” she said. Although she settled on storing the records in a self-storage facility, she had to arrange for a former employee to retrieve records if requested and also to manage the destruction of required documents.

Upon returning from New Zealand, Rideout and her husband shifted the focus of their family from his career to hers and set about starting FileBusters. It opened its doors for shredding and storage last January.

Rideout works in the business full time, and her husband, who works in California two weeks of every month, helps her out the other two weeks.

“It was my time to follow my dream,” she said.

Her professional dream dovetailed nicely with her passion for the environment. FileBusters recycles the paper files it manages.

“It makes a difference,” said Rideout. “For each ton of paper (recycled), 17 trees are saved, and 380 gallons of oil are saved.”

Rideout also gives back to the environment by donating 2 percent of her company’s profits and 2 percent of its employees’ time to environmentally related issues. At the end of the year, she plans to write notes to each of her customers informing them of how many trees were saved by their recycling efforts, and she will plant a tree for each of them.

“I’m building relationships with people, so that they trust me and they trust FileBusters in maintaining the security and confidentiality of their records,” Rideout said.

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