Small business tips on preparing for the festive season

The festive season seems to come around faster every year, and for small business owners it is a time of year that can bring with it additional stress.

Budgeting concerns, worries about how to start the New Year off well, staying motivated… These are just a few of the issues that can weigh heavy on the mind of a small business owner in the run up to the silly season.

With Christmas day just a week away, and as many business start to wind down for the festive break, KashFlow customers have shared some of their top tips on preparing for the holidays.

SALT.agency says:

“1. Security – If you’re in shared, or serviced office (like us) it might get a bit quiet, make sure you lock all the doors and windows
2. Backup – If you’re a big company then your backups should all be done automatically for you by your IT department. However, many small businesses forget about this task. Just before Christmas is an excellent time to back up both locally and ideally in the cloud. (We use Office 365 One Drive, but other solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive etc are all good and cheap options for small businesses.)
3. Tidy up – If you’re closing the office during the holidays, make sure you have a good tidy up before everyone leaves for Christmas. It’s always good to start the New Year with a nice organised office.
4. And last but certainly not least, don’t forget to clean out the fridge! There is nothing worse than coming back to a smelly fridge. Yuk!”

We Are Tea says that forward planning is key, and every year they have certain steps to follow ahead of the Christmas break. They say:

“1. We inform our loyal customers about our Christmas closure and ensure they order early December. We pull a list of the customers via KashFlow and connect it to our Mailchimp account to send them all a Christmas greetings newsletter.
2. We ensure we order enough tea and other material from our various suppliers to meet orders. Again, we use KashFlow to evaluate the quantities of tea and other items we have to order from sales data from the past months and same period last year. We always hold a bit of stock at the office for emergency orders.
3. We also plan exciting projects for the New Year in order to be ready (and less submerged by the workflow) after this festive period.”

Planning is important, but so is keeping staff motivated and happy during this time. Pinksheep for example uses the office Christmas tree to motivate and keeps things jolly:

“What Pinksheep do for is on the first day of December we set up a Christmas tree and put presents (and dares) under the tree. Each time a member of staff confirms a sale they get to choose a present under the tree!”

What are your tops tips for the festive season? Share your comments on Facebook and Twitter.