MBA2032 How To Prepare Your Business For a Holiday + Free Ride Friday

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hunter $100 MBA show, helping you get better at business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's lesson is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won't just like today. It's that easy and you are in the draw until you win. So as long as you leave us a review, you got a chance to win every single week. In today's episode, you will learn how to prepare your business for a holiday. Now, we're not talking about a holiday like a vacation, but more like a public holiday where your business is closed. We just wrapped up Easter, but there are other holidays coming up. Whether it's Memorial Day or fourth of July or whatever local holiday you observe in your country, how do you make sure your customers are aware where you're not available? How can you set things up so you're still serving your audience even though you're not around. Also, how to communicate and manage when people are off on your team. And also if it's a public holiday for you but not for other people on your team. Like if you have a remote team, do they need to be off as well? We'll talk about all that and more in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Expired in 2012.

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Preparing your business for a public holiday is actually quite important because as much as possible you want to make sure that your business keeps going. But at the same time there are certain things you're not going to be able to do because it requires you to be around, like customer support. How do you handle it? Also, how do you manage public holidays and days off within your team? I'm going to share with you what has worked for my business and my team so that you can get some ideas and maybe apply it to your own business. Number one, the first concern I have when we have a public holiday coming up is how can we make sure that we make it clear to customers what they'll have access to and what they won't have access to. So for example, on Christmas Day we are closed, so we like to give our customers a heads up and say hey, on Christmas Day you'll not be able to reach us or speak to a customer service representative or as we like to call them, ninjas. We sent out an email about two weeks in advance and we also put up a reminder in our actual customer support app which we use Intercom. It's that little bubble on the bottom right hand corner you'll see on websites letting them know in advance, hey, on this date we will not be available. Now sometimes your customers will get the email. They might see the reminder but forget or maybe they didn't read the email and they'll get to your website on Christmas day and might have a question. Now even though we are not around, we still want to be able to serve them any way we can. So we give them suggestions. Hey, you can search our support articles, you might find your answer there and may not need to ask anybody. We might suggest some blogs that might be helpful to them. Blog posts, we might direct them to A recorded demo so they can watch the demo and get all their answers. And we'll suggest, hey, you can still write to us and we'll get back to you via email as soon as we're back in action and we actually state when we'll be back. The point here is that communication actually will solve a lot of your problems and really mitigate expectations. At the end of the day, people won't be upset as long as they know what to expect. And this is why we do that whole heads up email two weeks in advance. We put up a message on our site and try to communicate. Communicate, communicate. You really can't over communicate when it comes to business. Now that's the customer service side of things in business. But there are other aspects in your business that have to keep on going, like marketing, like sales, like customer success. So what we like to do is try to automate as much as possible, meaning we will automate all our marketing emails so they go out regardless if there's a day off or not. We have email sequences that are built based on the journey of the customer. So regardless of when they sign up, they get the right emails guiding them through as they onboard. When it comes to customer success, we automate the email to invite them to come on a call. And of course they'll choose on the calendar when they'll be able to attend a call. And if it's a holiday, that choice, that day won't be available. So there might be things that you do that you don't automate already. So for example, some people actually write their weekly newsletter a few days before the actual holiday and then they might miss it, they might forget because they were on holiday. So this is why it's important to make sure you batch and you think ahead in your calendar and write these things in advance. There's nothing stopping you from writing the next four weekly newsletters in advance. You can always edit it and add a couple of things if you wanted to, change it if you wanted to. But if they're scheduled to go out every single week, you can get ahead of it. Now what about the team itself? Now every company has different policies depending on where they live and the regulations. But we have a remote team, so it's really hard to dictate what days should be off because we have teammates in Europe, we have teammates in India, we have teammates in the us, we have teammates in Asia, all with different kinds of holidays, public holidays, ethnic holidays, religious holidays. And we feel it's kind of unfair that we actually dictate what holidays they should take off, even if it has nothing to do with them. Like why would somebody in the Philippines have 4th of July off? It's not their national holiday. So we set up a system where basically we have company wide days off, meaning that everybody's off on these particular days. This is like New Year's and a few other days that we've chosen outside of those days. We give each team member five floating holidays that they can choose. So these are five days they can choose based on their own local holidays. It only makes sense for them to be with their family and friends on a holiday that their whole country is celebrating. And then on top of that, they have their normal days allotted for their holidays, their personal vacation time, sick days, all that kind of stuff. Now this is what works for our team. It's not something that's written in stone. We might modify or change it in the future. And of course, I advise you to check with your own local laws if you require people to be off certain days. And when it comes to this, I do encourage you to be as flexible as possible to accommodate these types of special holidays for your team. Now many people ask me, Omar, what about sending a holiday message to celebrate with your customers? Well, my answer to that is that it's totally up to you and your brand. It also depends a lot about where your customers are and what holidays they celebrate. With Webinar Ninja software, we have a very diverse customer base from all parts around the world. Plus there's a lot of diversity when it comes to their religious holidays. So you gotta make a choice. You know, are you going to send out a message for all your customers wishing them a happy Easter, Christmas, Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, I can go on and on, right? There's holidays all the time because of everybody's diverse beliefs. And of course there's holidays all the time because of, you know, there's many faiths out there, there's many countries out there, different nationalities, different rituals. You might be sending an email out to all your customers every few weeks wishing them a happy holiday, whatever that holiday is. I'm not saying this to discourage you, I'm just saying it's a delicate balance. And you got to know your customers and do what's right for your business and your customers, of course, because you don't want to leave anybody out. Of course, we've all been there.

You hold onto a coupon, but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to GEICO to wrap up today's lesson.

Making sure your business is prepared for your next holiday on that calendar is quite important. You want to make sure you're prepared internally, externally, and that you have everything in order so that when the holiday kind of creeps around, you're not scrambling. You're not like, hey, let's put up a message. Just email our customers. One of the things we do is we put up a reminder in our calendar so whoever is responsible for doing whatever is necessary to, you know, communicate to customers, put up some sort of message on the website. Whatever it is, automate the newsletter. That person who's responsible for those things gets a reminder to do it two weeks before it needs to be done. That way it is way ahead of schedule and then you can relax and know that everything is okay. That wraps up today's lesson. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride and the winner is Keholaha. Keholaha is the handle on Apple Podcasts. Keholaha says thank you for helping me listen to the Whisper Within. I listen to the $100 NBA show as a part of my morning routine and I thank Omar for these daily lessons. I've been wanting to write a review for a while, but never knew how to adequately express my gratitude. The $100 MBA has been an inspiration and has amplified a rather dormant whisper within me. I know this podcast will continue to amplify that whisper within me and other listeners. Thank you. Well, thank you. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride to EZ course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at Easy Course, but you just want it for free. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Is there a way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes? Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the easiest ways to reduce stress in your business is to plan ahead. Is to know what's going to happen before it happens and to get it done way before you need to. Nothing is more stressful than having to deal with an urgent deadline because you forgot to do something. You can avoid this. And that's why I put together today's lesson. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

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Dang it.

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