MBA1657 How to Prepare Your Business for The Holidays + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online. You can check it out at EasyCourse co. It retails for $500 but you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Riot Friday. Just listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O Welco. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Power to the people, the business people that is every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to prepare your business for the holidays. We're about five and a half weeks away from Christmas and for many businesses this is a busy time. But even if your business is not one that goes gangbusters in sales, when it comes to Christmas, it's a time that many of your team members will want to take off. So you want to make sure you have a plan of action to be fully prepared for the holidays. Well before the end of November, we're going to be talking about how to make sure that your business doesn't skip a beat, that your customers get served properly, but at the same time that your team gets a chance to enjoy the holidays with their friends and family. How do you organize that? How do you set that up? That's what we talk about in Today's lesson. So let's get into it, but let's get down to business. For a lot of people, the holidays is a hectic time. Not only in their own families, but in their business. Of course, I love the holidays because we really prepare for them well in advance. And it's a really relaxed, calm time for us and our colleagues. And I'll tell you why. It's all about communication and setting up expectations. We know that it's important for us and our colleagues, our team members, to enjoy the holidays with friends and family. So we want to give that to them. We don't want them to be stressed out. So we work around that to make sure that our whole team has a chance to relax, to recharge, to enjoy being with family. So our company actually closes down. We actually do not work on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after Christmas. Now, many people might not agree with that. They say, hey, you're an online business, should be open 24 7. You should get people to work during those shifts. You're leaving money on the table. Well, I didn't build a business so I can do things I don't want to do. Right? I'm building a business to make sure it fits with my lifestyle and fits the lifestyle and the needs of my team members. And guess what? It's okay to close as long as you communicate it to your customers so well in advance. About three to four weeks before we actually take off for those three days on holiday, we tell our customers, hey, we take off during these three days. We make sure all our promotions, all our sales, all the things we're doing to really bring in customers all happen well before this time. Okay? We planned this so that there is no need to be around. Okay? Secondly, we tell our customers that we won't be around, but we'll be back on this date. And what we found over doing this year after year is that our customers are totally fine with this. In fact, they think it's awesome. And as long as they're given a heads up and they know. And we do this via email. We do this by in app message. We do this in our chat message as a automatic kind of reminder. Hey, just a reminder will be not available these days coming in a few weeks. And this allows everybody on the team, you know, from our developers to designers to marketers to customer service agents, to all take a break when it comes to something like our podcast where we are producing content, we edit, we do all that stuff and we just do it in advance. We batch IT and we schedule everything and we let the computers take care of things. Okay? That's the beauty of technology. You can record and edit and schedule everything in advance so that you can enjoy the time off. But you can't do it if you don't plan for it. If you don't make sure it's in the calendar and you make sure that you're planning for it with your task lists leading up to it. Now, if you're at the top of business, where you have to be open on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, it's just your business depends on it. You're a toy store. The first thing I want you to do is question your assumption that it's a madhouse in your business during that time. Maybe it is busy or you have customers, but it's not as busy as you think it might be. Take a look at your analytics, look at the data, look at the traffic on Google Analytics, look at your ticket volume from the past, your customer support tickets, see what's going on. You might just need one person to work as a customer support agent or a help desk during that day. We've had to do this on different other holidays. What we do is we ask for volunteers on the team to cover those shifts. It's totally voluntary and we actually give them double pay that day. So it's a little bit of a bonus to work there. And there's some people that may not value that particular holiday as much as you do or much as anybody else. Maybe they celebrate other holidays and they're happy to work that day for double pay. And for the most part it's not as busy as a normal day. Now, if your company is very busy before the holidays, during the holidays, maybe the week before Christmas, you know this, this is the, you know the nature of your business, then you need to make sure there's all hands on deck before you take off. Make sure that no one's taking off during that time. Nobody's taking any kind of extended holidays. It's kind of like, you know, a red alert, all hands on deck time, where you need as many people on the team to be working. Understand that they can't do this forever. You can't have people in an intense situation weeks on end. They're going to need a break. So make sure it's a few days or a week at most. Now let's talk about the actual product, services, all that kind of stuff. Back in the day, I had my own clothing line and the holidays was a very busy time. And one of the challenges I had was making sure I had enough stock on hand to sell at all during the holidays. Now, if you have a choice between having too much stock and not enough stock where you sell out, the latter is always better. It's always better to sell out and have a sense of, wow, this is a very popular product, very popular brand. Things sell out here. That's a better look for you than being overly stocked. And you're left with a lot of stock to sell. And if you're in an industry like fashion, like I was, you just can't keep things forever. You can only sell it for maybe a couple more months, if that, and then the season's over. You gotta change things up. The same thing in toys, you know, the hot toys are not the same the next Christmas. You can always look at historical data and see how things went last year. Remember, every year is gonna be a bit different depending on the circumstances of the year. People are predicting that this year, this holiday season is gonna be one of the biggest holiday seasons of all time in online shopping because of the pandemic. And also people are predicting people are gonna be spending actually more this hol. They're trying to have some sort of happiness, some sort of celebration, and they're willing to spend on the holidays since they're not going on vacations, they're not getting around, they're not spending on eating out that much anymore, so they'll spend on the holidays. Keep that in mind in your estimations. If there's one piece of advice I would give you when it comes to promoting your sales for the holiday, is to start early. There's a reason why I really think that, and I've tried this in the past, and it really is very, very powerful, is that if you start early, let's say, for example, your holiday sale is the first week of December, not, you know, right before Christmas. You are going to get people early on before they spend their money. You're also going to be able to save a lot of money on marketing because your marketing dollars will go a lot longer because it's not as hyper, hyper crowded right before the holidays on Facebook ads and Instagram ads and Google and all that stuff. You're also going to deal with the rush of the holiday season for your business early on so you can start winding down and your team can enjoy its time. And of course, you can hit your quarterly goals, your quarter four goal, end of your goal earlier. And even if you don't hit the goal, you know how much left you need to Hit the goal where you have a few more weeks where you can try to make up that gap. The holidays should not be hectic, but you need to plan for it to not be hectic. You gotta put things in place like we mentioned today so you can enjoy them. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

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Up today's lesson, prepare your business for the holidays. Make sure your team is ready. Make sure you're planning things in advance. Make sure you're ready for your customers. Do this now. Don't let November go by without having to do this. And of course, if you're doing a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale, this should be done by now. If not, get to it today. Okay? You want to make sure that everything is all in place and ready to go. And of course, don't forget to enjoy the holidays. Have some time with your family and friends if that's your thing. You're working hard so you can also, you guessed it, play hard. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Asawa. Asawa says great podcast. 5 stars. Omar is a great teacher. I learn a lot from him. Short and sweet. Review from Azawa and thank you so much for your review. Your mission is to email me at omar@100mba net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy course over at easycourse co. You won a free ride. Congrats. If you want to win a free ride. If you're listening like, hey, how can I get in on that free ride? Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best ways to plan ahead and make sure you get things done ahead of time is to plug it into your calendar block. Book yourself with the tasks you need to do to be prepared to pull this off. If it's not on the calendar, it's just not going to happen. So make sure you make time. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Gas, snacks, tolls this trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.