Getting your business rolling this holiday
It’s that time again, and the holidays are in full swing. The sounds of the holidays are in the air, peppermint drinks are warming shoppers nationwide, and wallets are busting open. Thanksgiving weekend sales were slumped, and retailers are expected to gut prices in the next two weeks to generate sales.
You’re not Target or Walmart, but there are things you could be doing to make sure your holidays go off without a hitch. Carla Freberg, Sales Manger of the Vendor Services Group at Balboa Capital offers five tips in her own words below.
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- Spread the word about your holiday sales online. Even if your business is small, making periodic updates to your company website helps keep it optimized for search, and shows your visitors that you are active online. You can promote your upcoming holiday deals via social networks such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
- Determine your holiday sales goals and stock up and staff up appropriately. This will help you to predict your inventory, workforce, payroll, and marketing needs, to name a few.
- After determining which items you want to promote over the holidays, find out what your competitors are charging to see how your business sizes up. You can do this by visiting their stores, checking their websites, or making phone calls. If you own a small business, avoid competing with the large chain store’s prices. They have bigger buying power and can purchase items in large quantities for less.
- Make sure you have enough inventory – if you’re in retail, this could mean acquiring a working capital loan, which offers an easy application and approval process.
- If there’s not enough time (or budget!) to hire new employees, it’s important to train the existing employees on how to handle the extra customers. Schedule the right number of employees, and make sure you have enough workers tending to the cash registers during peak time periods.
