Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, host Melissa Swink discusses three practical strategies for preparing your business for the holiday season. She emphasizes the importance of setting clear intentions, planning for time off, ensuring operational coverage, and determining your top priorities to finish the year strong. Tune in to learn how to navigate the busy holiday season with balance and joy!

Key Highlights:

• It’s important to prepare your business early for the holiday season.
• Set clear intentions for the final months of the year.
• Plan for time off and ensure operational coverage.
• Ask your team and clients about holiday availability.
• Pick a few top priorities for the end of the year.
• Maintain consistent marketing efforts during the holiday season, but make sure content is easily digestible content for your audience.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode we're going to talk about how to prepare your business for the holiday season. And the idea for this episode came from a couple of different directions. First of all, at the time of this recording, it's about mid-October.

And here in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the cool fall weather has set in. It has been chilly. It has been windy. It has been cloudy. And all of that like classic October weather has set in. Gone are the unseasonably warm temperatures that we've been experiencing through fall thus far. And so of course, with that, you start thinking ahead to, you know, for us, Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the things that are coming up.

So I'm going to go through some of the ways that I prepare for the holiday season personally, offer my recommendations that I offer to my clients as well. But I just want to start off by saying this may look different based on the type of business that you're in. You know, I am coming from the perspective of having a service based business with a full team in a variety of clients in many different industries. You might be a more seasonal business where

I'm thinking about accountants where tax season is quote unquote their busiest season, you know, kind of that January through April, but a lot of tax planning and things start to happen this time of year. So maybe summer and late spring was pretty relaxed for you and now you're kind of ramping up depending on if you're more seasonal. And then certainly if you're in a retail type of business,

This is like game on season for you. So depending on what type of business you have, these steps might look a little bit different, but we're going to talk about all of them and different ways to kind of put a spin on it based on you and what your unique needs are. Okay. So the first way that we want to prepare our business for the upcoming season is to really get clear and ask yourself, what do you want?

for these final months of the year. What do you want those months to look like? So there's obviously a variety of ways that we can approach this season in terms of our intentions. So maybe you are the type who really loves this time of year and all the gatherings and the warmness and the holiday spirit and all of that. And maybe you just are thinking, you know, honestly, I push.

really hard and I've had my foot on the gas pedal in my business and my life all through up to this point of the year. And this is the time of year where I have earned that ability to be able to maybe back off the gas pedal a little bit and just kind of coast and enjoy this time and give myself permission to take a step back from the day to day, maybe work fewer hours than I normally do. You're self-employed. You have that right.

you have earned that ability to declare what you want for your schedule. If that's you, fantastic. We're gonna get to your action step in a minute. On the flip side, many of us who are achievers and goal-oriented, we're like, okay, it's the final months of the year, last 60, 90 days, depending on when you're listening to this, but.

December 31st of this year, maybe we're doubling down on our efforts. Okay, maybe it's time to zero in and focus. Maybe it is a combination of these things where maybe you're like, have a lot of goals. There is one in particular that I'm very focused on. I'm going to focus on that one. And I'm also going to give myself permission to maybe take Fridays off so I can enjoy some time with friends and loved ones and enjoy this season. It's a combination.

Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's looking like I want to prioritize self-care because this season is very, very triggering for me. Maybe you've got some history in your life that this season is particularly stressful for you and do this is a lot of anxiety. Maybe this season means seeing people that really can be triggering for you. I want to honor that and respect that. And I want you to honor and respect that in yourself as well.

I see you, I hear you, just know what do you want? What are your intentions for these last months of the year? And so no matter where you're coming from, no matter what your intentions are, your action step on this is going to be use time blocking to set up your calendar accordingly. Now I'm not gonna dive deep into time blocking and calendar management and all of that in today's episode, but if you wanna get...

more information about that. did talk about it quite extensively in episode five. So you can go back and listen to that. But the point is, is that we want to put parameters on what do we want to be spending our time on during this holiday season. Because I can tell you this much, it will fill up quickly. So if you want to take Fridays off to enjoy the season, have lunch with friends, maybe you want to reserve Sundays for brunch with loved ones.

Maybe you wanna do some holiday shopping. Maybe there are days that the kids will be in school and you wanna get some of your preparations taken care of without little ones and helpers in hand. Then block those times off in your calendar. Block those days off. Maybe you are working on that goal that you absolutely, positively want to hit before the end of the year. What do you need to do in order to make that happen? Block off those times in your calendar.

Maybe if this is a particularly stressful season for you, this is a great time to treat yourself to a massage or maybe you want to go to a local yoga studio and make sure that you get in some relaxation time and some breathing and some stretching and some overall movement for your body. Whatever that looks like for you, put it in the calendar. Reserve that time for you and do it in advance before everything else just inevitably creeps up and fills in. Okay?

All right, step number two, or I should say the second way to prepare your business for the holiday season is to prepare for time off and make sure that you have coverage that is set for necessary operations. Now again, this might vary drastically for you based on the type of business that you're in. I'm gonna go ahead and go to our retail listeners for a moment here. So retail, this is a big season for you.

So now is the time to maybe gather your team up and take a look at, what are our hours going to be? Are we expanding our hours in the evenings and weekends during primary shopping season? Who needs off and when? Tell me now so we can plan for coverage accordingly. That sort of a thing. So maybe it's taking a look at what hours do we need to be open? What coverage do we have for those hours? And so on.

Now, on the flip side, maybe if you're like me, you're in more of a service-based industry where a lot of our clients are going to be kind of taking a step back during holiday season as well. I like to survey my team at least a month in advance. Usually we get these out probably by mid-November and say, when are you going to be planning some time off, like, aka when are kids home for holiday break, winter break, things like that, and start planning ahead to see

who is going to be off, when are they going to be off, what clients are affected or what operations may be affected by this time off, and who else is available to be able to help with some of these things, to help with coverage. And then that way, as we're looking ahead, we're able to plan for that backup coverage and do some cross-training, making sure that those who are going to be...

supporting clients during that time off, during others time off, or maybe they're going to be doing some critical operations during the time that others are off so that we can make sure they have access to what they need access to in terms of software and things like that. And they have the tools that they need in order to have things go as smoothly as possible as we have a more limited team available. We also take a look at

What are our clients going to be needing from us during that time as well? So we survey our team, we also survey our clients. Hey, during these weeks, there may be limited availability. What do you need from us during that time? And so we're able to make sure that everybody can have the time off that they desire and also make sure that needs are being met. And so your action step here with making these preparations kind of

having conversations with your team, having conversations with your customers is to figure out what is needed for your business during these more intense holiday weeks. So this can look like creating schedules in advance. Maybe it looks like planning ahead, working ahead. Maybe there are things that can be done in advance and ultimately scheduled out like super low hanging fruit for an example here could be social media posts.

You know, maybe we're going to be scheduling out a few more weeks in advance so that we have all of our holiday posts ready to go so that nobody is having to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's scheduling out content for the beginning of January. Maybe we're looking at that ahead of time. Another thing is, you know, those communications, letting your clients know we're going to have limited availability this week or, you know, we're going to be closed from this time to this time, things like that. As much notice that you can give people to

plan accordingly, the better and the less stressful all those last minute requests are going to be. So we're trying to mitigate those types of situations so that we can all be as relaxed as possible and prepared as possible. Again, this might look a little bit different for you based on what type of business you have. Maybe it's communicating with your customers, hey, we're gonna be open late on Thursday evenings. And maybe you have some special.

like sip and shop types of things to attract them into your store during this time. All of these things, super important to start planning ahead, making sure you have coverage and communicating that with your customers. Okay, the final way that I recommend preparing for the holiday season for my general list based on varieties of businesses is to determine your top priorities for the next few months. It's really easy to get pulled in different directions.

You know, we're planning ahead, we're doing schedules, we're trying to work ahead for coverage for clients and customers and make sure that they all have what they need. But what are our most important priorities? So when we take a look at, you know, the overall growth of your business, sales is something that definitely comes to mind. Again, if you're a retail, this is primary sales season for you. If you are more of a seasonal business or you're maybe more of a service based business like we are,

keep in mind right now that people are in spending mode. You know, there's a lot of momentum that happens this time of year where people are, you know, ordering online, they're visiting their local favorite shops, they're buying for families and loved ones and everything, and they're just kind of in that mode of investing. And so I used to make the mistake of thinking, well, people are buying other things, they're not really shopping for my services right now. But that actually hasn't been the case. There have been plenty of years that

our holiday seasons, I'm talking November, December, even into January, where people are like, let's go, I'm ready to invest in hiring a team or I want to get a website built before the end of the year, that sort of thing. If you don't find yourself in a business that has a lot of holiday demand, don't think that sales aren't important during this time of year. I would highly encourage you to maintain

you know, your outreach activities, maybe even create a special offer to knowing your audience and what types of things your customers are looking for this time of year. What are some of the things that they would like extra support on? What are some things that you can offer them within this season that would be of value to them and making sure that you're communicating consistently, probably even more than you normally would just because it's the most distracting time of the year of what those offers might be.

Certainly now is not the time to peel back on your marketing. Now your marketing might look a little bit different this time of year and I'll explain why in a second. The thing is we want to stay consistent with marketing because what we don't want to have happen is kind of that feast and famine cycle. We want to continue to maintain and nurture our pipeline and our prospective customers during this time of year.

12 most popular services of that particular year. It's light content. It's informative. It's engaging. It's something that people can kind of glance at and like, yeah, I could use help with that. hmm, that's really interesting. I didn't realize that you could outsource something like that. So it's just, it's easily digestible, but it's consistent. It's still out there. It's not like we have disappeared completely from the web because it's, you know, we're not Amazon, if that makes sense.

Other things to take a look at for top priorities for these last few months. Projects. What are some projects that you absolutely want to make sure that you complete before the end of this year because you do not want to carry them over to 2025? Most importantly, when you determine what those projects are, who can help you with those? I find that there's so much more momentum that happens when I get others involved in the projects that I'm working on.

If it is something that is just sitting on my plate, guess what? It's probably one of the first things to get pushed on the back burner because there's always something more pressing that comes up. But when I get others involved in the process, even if it's a starting point, even if it's sending a few bullet points over to my copywriter to get an email started for me, and then I can like polish it up and hand it off to another team member to send out the email, great, but.

I need to get that off of my plate. If I sat down to write the email myself and put it in a flow desk, that's the email software that we use. I mean, I would always find 100 other more important things to get done. So most importantly, what are the most important projects that you absolutely want to complete before the end of this year? And step two of that is who can help you with that? If you're unable to invest in help with getting these projects done,

Do you have a quote unquote business bestie that you can communicate with and have that person hold you accountable to take action steps to get those projects completed? Okay. I hope you found this information helpful. It's kind of a combination of, you know, the mental state that I'm in given the weather and some of the things that I'm starting to see from others content, but then also sharing a little bit more behind the scenes of

how we prepare our business for the holidays and how you can do the same. So if you know a business owner who is going to be juggling multiple priorities during this upcoming holiday season, that's a lot of people, by the way, lots of parents, grandparents, and we're talking about people with families, people with friend groups, people who are volunteering a lot during the season, our retailers, we have so many.

priorities this holiday season. So this is probably quite a few of you, but would you please consider sharing this episode with them? I think getting a jumpstart on your intentions and your preparations will definitely help with getting you set up for success this season and feeling like you've accomplished what you've wanted to, but then also giving yourself permission to also enjoy the things that matter most to you during this season. So.

Thank you so much for listening today. I hope that you got a lot out of it and I look forward to sharing more tips and tools and strategies to grow your business beyond you in an upcoming episode. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.