6 Tips to Run a Business and Keep Calm This Christmas

Yes, Christmas is an amazing time of year, but for business owners like you, it’s often a time of stress, long hours and full up diaries. That’s why we have created an emergency plan for staying sane during the stressful Christmas days and enjoying the most wonderful time of the year, despite the rush.

The last tip will really save you!

Our Tips for a More Stress-Free Christmas:

1. Send Christmas cards to your customers now

If you’re sending customer Christmas cards (which we recommend as a nice personal touch), then get them sent off ASAP. This will save you the stress a week before Christmas when you will be busy enough with running the business and planning Christmas with your family.

2. Employ temporary staff

This doesn’t mean that you need a new employee, but at this extremely busy time, an extra pair of hands may be useful. This would be an extra cost, but would reduce stress and may mean you can take on more jobs. Are there any simple jobs you could pay someone, like a nephew, to do?

3. Get commercial businesses to book you in January

While you’re fitting every job into your busy schedule in December, January is usually much quieter. Domestic customers probably won’t want to wait, but commercial businesses don’t necessarily need immediate cleaning etc. Maybe you can promise them a discount if they let the job be done in January instead of December.

4. Don’t over-schedule your time

You’re only human, so if there are more customers than you feel you could reach, then try and move the work to January if possible. There’s no point in risking the quality of your work and thereby your reputation if you know you can’t manage to do all the jobs.

5. Order your Xmas gifts Online

If you dedicate an evening to buying all of your presents online you’ll have more time to put into your business. Anything you can do to get these standard Christmas tasks out of the way will mean you can focus on work. Get rid of all that time wasted walking around the shops.

6. Use productivity tools to keep organised

We love finding time saving and organisational tools to keep us up to date with all of our customers, here’s a few of our favourites:

• Boomerang is a Google Chrome for Gmail, you can install this to send emails at a later date. Why not get ahead of yourself before the Christmas rush and use it to schedule invoices and ‘please leave us a review’ reminder emails.
• Is your Facebook inbox going crazy with last minute requests? We know it’s hard to answer all of your messages whilst you are out working. Try MANYCHAT, this is an automated bot that answers your Facebook messages for you so no customer is left waiting for a response. Here’s a great tutorial on how to install MANYCHAT in minutes. Click here to watch the tutorial. 
• HootSuite is awesome for scheduling all your social media posts on all the platforms you use. Now, you don’t have to log in to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Instagram… you can do it all from one place. You can schedule your posts well in advance so it looks like you’re active on social media over the festive period without having to login once!
• Ditch the hardback diary this Christmas, it is much easier and safer to have all of your appointments online (and backed up the cloud). We recommend Google Calendar as you can add all of your employees and ensure you never miss an appointment. There is also a Google Calendar app which will notify you before each job and even tell you when to set off for each appointment based on the traffic!