How Businesses Can Prepare For the Busy Holiday Season

Use These Tips to Stay on Top of Work During the Holidays

Between your business life and personal life, it can be tough to juggle competing priorities during the holiday season.

To add to the stress, the holidays are also the busiest time of year for many businesses, especially when you consider end-of-the-year business activities, too.

So, if you’re in need of some helpful and cost-effective resources, tools, and tips that will give you more room to breathe this year, keep reading. 

Dealing with an uptick in customers during the holiday season

During the holidays, retail businesses tend to see a dramatic increase in the number of customers they serve. This is true for both brick and mortar storefronts and online businesses.

Here’s how to make sure you’re prepared:

• On the ecommerce side, it’s important to make sure your website is updated with popular products. This includes holiday sales and promotions.
• Use an ecommerce tool, like Shopify, to easily manage online inventory, shopping carts, and transactions.
• If supply chains and shipping services are expected to be slow or unreliable, don’t sleep on ordering inventory and other essential supplies. Plan early whenever possible.
• Make sure seasonal holiday-related tasks, like mailing holiday cards and promotional materials, don’t get lost in the shuffle. Schedule them in your calendar, or consider getting some extra help.
• In the meantime, don’t forget about all of those pesky daily tasks that can easily get swept to the side when things are busy (like answering the phones).

Let’s take a deeper look at what it might look like for your business to have some extra help during the holidays, because outsourcing and delegating are the easiest ways to make sure nothing slips through the cracks while the business is busy.

Why it makes sense to hire extra administrative help during the holidays

You don’t need to hire full-time support staff to survive the holidays.

You don’t even need to post a job listing, sort through resumes, and conduct interviews.

That’s because virtual assistant service providers, like Intelligent Office, take care of those details for you. Here’s how it works:

• Reach out to a virtual assistant provider. Tell them about your business and it’s administrative needs.
• Some common, everyday needs that businesses have include phone management, mail management, scheduling, invoicing, and customer service support. A virtual assistant can take care of all this, and more.
• The provider will get back to you with a custom quote. You choose how much support you need, nothing more and nothing less.

In addition to cost-effective, scalable administrative support, many virtual assistant providers also have a variety of business center locations that members can utilize when traveling for the holidays. 

It’s a perk that many of our members at Intelligent Office are happy to have, since holiday travel can make it difficult to end the year on a productive note.

Small business owners, make sure you plan ahead for the holiday season

If you haven’t started your holiday and end-of-year preparations yet, it’s time to get started. 

By taking advantage of scalable and inexpensive support services, your business can plan for and manage one of the busiest times of the year. And that means you’ll hit the ground running in the New Year.