While seasons of high demand bring excitement to small business owners, they often create additional stress that prevents them from providing the best customer experience possible. Regardless of your situation, here are five ways to sustain your business and yourself in the midst of chaos and keep the customer experience top of mind.
Related: How To Find the Right Time Management Method for You
1. Plan ahead
Poor planning usually leads to less-than-desirable results and dissatisfied customers. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a newcomer to the rush of high demand, careful consideration of the steps ahead is essential.
Use all the resources available to manage inventory and order needs, set schedules, consider a new promotion or marketing campaign and invest in customer service by reviewing protocols with your staff. If a plan isn’t possible due to constraints, make a list of what you can accomplish with what you have. As a wrap-up to the season, use hurdles as a learning experience for future planning.
Related: 6 Simple Ways to Build Wellness Into Your Busy Workday
2. Maintain positivity
Alongside a plan, keep your employees engaged and positive by staying calm when unexpected events arise (which they will!). A positive attitude in the face of adversity can mean the difference between a minor setback and a complete disaster. Some additions to your bustling routine could include:
- Celebrating small wins for you and your employees, such as verbal recognition during a team meeting or a small gift.
- Reframing negative thoughts as opportunities to improve or additional steps to success.
- Encouraging collaboration to solve complex problems.
- Customizing your workspace with objects that bring you joy and peace (e.g., motivational quotes, photos of loved ones, mementos).
When practicing optimism, be mindful that dismissing negative emotions is more harmful than helpful. Continue to validate genuine emotions and experiences from yourself and your team. Highs and lows are part of the human experience.
Related: How Optimists and Pessimists Can Get Along
3. Delegate often
A culture of success is a collaborative effort, one that rests on everyone’s shoulders. As a business leader or owner, you may find sharing the workload especially challenging when tasks need to be handled in a specific way. However, a healthy workplace should be teamwork-centric.
By delegating, you play to your employees’ strengths and provide ample space to focus on more important needs. Start by establishing a system that empowers your team to take pride in success. Then, motivate them to actively pursue that success. Finally, uphold personal and team accountability to ensure lasting results.
Also, consider outsourcing tasks beyond your immediate team to the community, such as other small businesses. For example, your neighborhood The UPS Store provides a convenient, one-stop shop for items that are missing from your to-do list – from printing marketing materials to packing and shipping thank-you gifts to select customers or returning online purchases.
Related: Why Proper Delegation Guarantees Team Success
4. Balance rest and productivity
As a business owner, doing right by your business requires doing right by yourself. As The UPS Store President Sarah Casalan would say, “If you don’t listen to your body, it will speak for you eventually.” By acknowledging that being productive requires setting aside time for rest, you will find enduring success in greater amounts than you would by prioritizing output alone. Some other helpful tips to get started on balancing time off with work to-dos:
- Take short breaks to reset and recharge yourself.
- Focus on one or two large projects at a time or several small ones.
- Delegate nonessential tasks to your team members.
- Set clear, firm boundaries on when you plan to stop working (e.g., I must be home by 7 p.m. and will not answer messages or calls until tomorrow). Follow this up with a physical boundary, such as turning off notifications or devices.
- Schedule time to be with family and friends during off-peak moments.
5. Express gratitude
When stability resumes, and even during busy moments, don’t forget to say thank you. A study by University of Miami researchers found that gratitude is strongly associated with people feeling happier, healthier and more grateful. It can even improve relationships and make stressful moments easier to manage and overcome.
Unsure where you should start as the busy season winds down? Write letters to your coworkers expressing your appreciation, call a former boss and share how they made a difference in your life, or take a quiet moment to reflect on what you’re grateful for from the past year. To take it a step further, make gratitude a regular part of your personal and professional life. Keep a gratitude journal or spend a day each month sharing thanks and seeing what these new traditions bring you and those around you a year later.
The hustle and bustle of peak business seasons can bring a mix of emotions and priorities. To create lasting success for yourself, your business and the people you serve, plan early, lean on coworkers, family and friends and prioritize self-care when possible. When the last checkbox is marked complete, say cheers and thank you to those who helped you get there.
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