Holiday season

Holidays are on us once again –I really love my summer holiday as it is a time when I can recharge my batteries completely and get away from my desk!
I absolutely love my work and so even during other times in the year when I shouldn’t be working, I often find an excuse to spend the odd hour at my desk doing some sort of work related activity. But come the summer –even I know it’s time to get away. But how as business owners can we drop everything for a couple of weeks without a disaster on our hands?

Well there are several ways of handling this! The first is to tell everyone you can think of that you will be away during the next couple of weeks and so you will deal with any enquiries they may have after that. You can put a message on you answering machine stating that your office will be closed until a certain date, and after that you will respond to any messages that have been left for you. This isn’t unreasonable –everyone is entitled to a holiday and I for one wouldn’t be put off if someone I had called had a polite and clear message telling me this. Just don’t go away without leaving this type of message though because there is nothing more annoying for a customer thinking you are ignoring them! If you haven’t told them then they are not to know you are on holiday and therefore not to know that you just are not responding to their message –this can be pretty damaging to your reputation.

The second way of dealing with holiday is by getting someone else to carry on with some parts of the business for you. This is easy of course if you have employees who have worked with you for a while and who therefore know how you go about the business. But for those of you who are working on your own it’s not right to feel that you can’t go away because you may miss a really important call from a really important potential client. A great solution is to invest in an answering service for the duration of your holiday. How do these work? Well - you can search online for telephone answering services. They vary considerably in the services that they offer so it is worth doing a bit of research and even calling a few to see what their telephone manner is like. Then once you have chosen one to use, you basically spend a bit of time explaining your business to them so that they get to know you and how you would like different types of calls to be answered. Once you have gone away, your calls will be diverted directly to the answering service offices and will be answered by a real person not a machine. Now obviously the receptionist won’t be able to actually help your customers in the way that you do, but she will be able to book appointments for when you return, take messages, and even send out email information about your business to enquirers. The caller will not know that this receptionist isn’t actually sitting in your office taking the call –in fact using an answering service can give a very good impression of your company to callers. Many businesses decide to use these services even when they are not on holiday, but perhaps just out at meetings or even when concentrating on a heavy workload and not wanting the phone to interrupt them.

It’s certainly worth thinking about how your business looks to prospective customers whilst you are holiday and to plan beforehand so that you are not worrying about the business the whole time you are away –but even more importantly once you have set off on your break stop worrying and start enjoying! There is nothing you can do now anyway and you need to relax, unwind and enjoy yourself so that when you get back you are ready for anything.