How to Prepare Your Small Business for Summer
16/05/2022
Summer can be a brilliant period – holidays, sunshine and the outdoors, but for small business owners, summertime can be very daunting and it’s important to be prepared for the season ahead.
With employees wanting annual leave, internship opportunities and needing to take a break yourself, our guide on preparing your small business for summer will give you a relaxed mind and options to plan for the future…
1. Managing Staff Holiday Requests
The first crucial step toward a peaceful summer is managing your employee’s holiday requests with plenty of time to go ahead of their request, giving you enough planning time for staffing gaps. Even if your business is small and you only have a handful of employees, this makes it even more important to keep track of.
Planning annual leave will be highly beneficial when it comes to avoiding staff shortages, clashes with time management and allowing you to see when you could take some time off yourself or arrange staff covers if needed.
Having these holidays scheduled and approved will give you peace of mind that you won’t be left without help and your business can continue running smoothly during summer.
2. Marketing Strategies
With summer, comes new trends, strategies and marketing techniques which you can apply in order to keep your small business relevant. These trends are usually seasonal but can drive more traffic to your business which consequently could boost your business all year round.
Some seasonal marketing strategies include – specific offers, special products and summer-themed deals. It’s a time when everyone is enjoying the outdoors, travelling abroad and having a lot more free time to spend looking through businesses and what they have to offer, take advantage of that and adapt some summer marketing to your small business.
3. Improve Your Business
When is a better time to better your business than summer? Never.
With some businesses stereotypically being quieter over the summer months, now would be a great time to improve what you’ve been meaning to do over the last months and work on your business more. Things like website development, social media channels and advertisement could benefit from being looked over and analysed as to whether they are performing to the best of their abilities.
Now would be a great time to get in touch with a marketing agency and come up with strategies that can work for your small business, driving more traffic and clients to you.
Head on over to our friends at Audience who can help you with the marketing side of your business!
4. Hiring an Intern
If you think you might have staffing issues over the summer, or you are looking for a new potential team member with fresh talent, considering an internship may be very beneficial to you and your small business.
Student holidays are mostly in summer and this is a time where students (university and college) will be looking for work experience and a potential career, if you feel you need an extra helping hand or are expecting a surge in business over the summer period, you could offer internships by contacting universities or colleges directly, or advertising them on job sites.
With the world of hybrid and remote working booming, some internships are great online and you could receive help with your business while being at home.
5. Keeping in Touch
Staying in touch with your clients over the summer is a key way of not losing any business, keeping them in the loop with mailers and social media posts will let customers know you haven’t disappeared and are open for business.
Having a mailing list is a great way of sending out messages to your customer base and keeping your name in their heads during the summer months.
There you have it! Following our five-step guide to preparing your business for summer will guarantee that you don’t have business losses and staffing issues and you get some well-deserved time for yourself.
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