Off to Orlando, Tenerife, or something more energetic like throwing tomatoes at your neighbours for fun in Eastern Spain? Holidays are the things that we all love and most of us work very hard to be able to afford and enjoy.
But holiday is also a word that strikes fear in the heart of most business owners. It means so many things and most of them are not good. Getting employees prepped to handle the workload, get clients ready to live without you for two weeks. It can also mean sleepless nights as you prepare for the time to go away. The most frantic periods for most successful business people is the 3 days ahead of your holiday and the three days when you get back, writes dluxe Business Editor Bart Dalton.
When was the last time you went on holiday and stayed away for more than 3 weeks, didn’t have your phone attached as a 6th finger, and didn’t worry about anything that was happening back at the proverbial ranch? If you have it all under control, stop reading this article now but if, like so many people who are trying to get to their “Next Level,” you like the idea of taking a little more down time, then keep on reading, as in my book ‘Grow, Sell and Retire’ I go through the concepts on how to make sure that you can go on a vacation every month and I’m going to share some of those methods here.
There are three things that you need to put in place to make sure
that you can go on your monthly holiday and relax.
1. Team based client engagement experience.
2. Communications standard operating procedure
3. Plan for pre-holiday and post-holiday work “Fill the
pipeline”
Whether you are a one-person business or a full complement of employees, you can build the feel of a team. Here are some secrets to make sure that you get the dynamic right. Make sure you assign roles and responsibilities for each stage of a process. The more people that have client engagement whether email, face to face or on the phone the better. (As long as you all have the same message) Ask yourself, even if it is just you, what roles would my client expect from a company of my size and how can I emulate or, even better, surpass their expectations. One more hint: hand written thank you notes are awesome at some point to enhance your client experience.
Establish a contact regime for your clients when you are working through an order or delivering a service. Give them specific time lines for each thing and why it will happen in that sequence.
Tell them what happens at each stage of the process and who will be contacting them with what information. People do not like surprises, so the more you can keep them from feeling out of control the better off you are going to be. Remember clients like things little and often versus all at once. Set out at least 3 different touch points on an order or at each stage of a client journey. The easiest way to look at it is Engage, Explain, Deliver and repeat the first two steps as many times as need be. If you end up doing this more that 2 times on the Explain step, get one of your friends that is not in your industry to listen to your words. In communication there is only Content and Context, we control the Context for our clients and how the Content is delivered in a language they can understand.
Now the difficult part, you need to put a plan in place to make sure that you are going to have your super fabulous holiday every time you go away.
1. Get your orders, clients and prospect contacted and discuss a next step with each of them.
2. Give them a time line and who will be calling them next.
3. Upsell at least one service or provide a referral to each one of them even if it is a great idea like a great book such as Grow, Sell and Retire?!? (wink)
So where are you off to? I have found that if you book your holiday now then you will expedite the need to do all of the above. When you are sipping your favourite beverage by the pool, beach or in a chilled out setting just remember that you were able to do it because you read an amazing article in Dluxe and now you are a holiday machine.
