Q:

Do you need to hire a professional in order to be pci compliant?

i run an organic food store, and after a conference call with my credit card service (card connect), do i really have to hire a PCI certified professional once a year in order to be pci compliant? If this is the case, how much does it cost?
Or am I just misreading things, i don't think any "cyber criminal" is going to target my business. NCR Silver handles all my credit card transactions. 

A:

If you handle credit card numbers, then yes, you have to be certified by a qualified auditor and this certification requires you hiring an external/independent PCI qualified security assessor.
However, you don't have to handle credit card numbers to be able to receive credit card payments. Instead, most smaller merchants use a PCI compliant payment processor like Stripe or PayPal to process card transactions. This reduces the scope of your PCI compliance signficantly, and you can be PCI compliant by just doing the PCI SAQ (Self Assessment Questionnaire), which you can do yourself without hiring a PCI auditor. Depending on your business type and how you handle card payments, there are different SAQs. The SAQ questionnaires will tell you if you need to actually use an auditor, which is primarily based on the volume of your expected transactions,  mechanism you integrate with your payment processor, and how you handle card data.
Primarily, you want to outsource as much as possible of your payment processing to the payment processor to reduce your scope and avoid handling card numbers. 

