Six ways to maximise your business this summer
The summer months are a time that most businesses dread, with multiple absences, especially once the school holidays start. The holiday period can potentially leave you light on staff and risking major communication breakdowns with staff members missing meetings and projects being passed from one to another. But there are ways to reduce the disruption.
Plan ahead
Ensuring your business runs effectively during the summer months starts long before summer. Planning who is off when and ensuring that you aren’t reduced to your skeleton staff for the first week of August is critical to keeping the business functioning. Make sure when going through requests for annual leave that only one or two within a department are absent at a time. This may seem unpopular when requests are rejected but it will be far more popular than leaving the business understaffed and heavily overworked.
However, spreading the burden of holiday does have its downsides….
Keep everyone in the loop
Over summer it is likely that you won’t have the full team most of the time, especially if your workforce contains a large number of parents. As a result, information may not be conveyed around your business effectively.
Ways to avoid this include holding a brief standup meeting each Monday morning over the summer to catch everyone up on any important information from meetings during the previous week. If you have remote workers or multiple offices, it is still important to relay this information, although a weekly newsletter with the headlines from the previous week may be the more effective option, ensuring everyone is reading from the same script.
Launch a summer campaign
While the summer may be a nightmare for planning workload, it’s even worse for new business, with weeks between communication with prospects. Ensure you have a record of when prospects are going away to contact them when they get back and use their holiday as an ice-breaker.
A summer campaign would also create a sense of urgency by introducing a campaign to end in early summer to gain business before people go away. An alternative option would be running a campaign during July and August, in order to increase your brand awareness to clients & prospects and ensure you are their first call when they get back.
Keep staff motivated
While half of your staff will come back sunned, relaxed and refreshed, there will inevitably be some who don’t go away during the Summer. While it is their choice, it is bound to sap motivation to see different empty chairs each week. To keep them motivated and their eye on the ball, how about running an incentive campaign with a lovely prize to ensure they are satisfied and focused throughout July & August.
Light the BBQ
It’s always important to make your customers feel valued. During the summer months the ideal way to do that is to get as many of them together as possible. How about arranging a Summer barbecue for clients, which provides the perfect opportunity to network in a relaxed environment? If you like, inviting the family will add an additional attraction, as a great day out for the kids. Don’t forget the gazebo though, just in case!
Get ahead
If business is quiet, get ahead with planning. Start work towards Q4 so that it is all ready to roll out when the workforce is back at full strength. If you want to rejig the office, it’s easier to prepare for this and do it in a quieter office because it will disrupt fewer people. In essence, if the Summer does prove to be quiet, you should see it as a great opportunity to do the bigger jobs that you keep putting off on your to-do list.
Do you want more advice to ensure the operations of your business are in shape? We go beyond a traditional accountant’s remit, including offering business advice & consultancy. Get in touch with us and we will show how we can work with you to ensure your business reaches its full potential.
Six ways to maximise your business this summer
