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- Update your website, social media profiles and email signature with your holiday opening hours. Clients don’t mind if you take a bit of time off every now and then. Clients do mind if they assume you’ll be closed from Xmas eve then turn up on the 22nd to find you’ve taken the whole week before Xmas off.
- Send and cards and gifts to clients and suppliers. If you’re going to do this, you probably should have done it already, or at least be well into the planning stage. If you haven’t (and you want to) get some cards out to your contacts, talk to your printer, buy some locally, or search Charity Cards to find a heap of places to buy Christmas Cards that give a portion of their proceeds to charity.
- Make sure your businesses emergency contact person has all the training they need and go over any potential issues with them. That way they’ll be able to handle pretty much everything without having to contact you several times a day. Or not contacting you and making a large and costly mistake.
- Compose an out-of-office message for your email and for your voicemail and put a reminder in your diary to load them before you finish up. Make sure the messages include:
- When you’re closing and when you’ll be open again
- What to do in case of emergency
- When you’ll be responding to messages if it won’t be the first thing you do on your return
- Put a note in your diary to remove the messages when you return. It’s a very bad look when your clients are still getting your out of office messages in February. Unless you’re having an extra-long break, in which case – good on you!
- Make up a contact list of all the people you might need to contact in an emergency while you’re away. Save it in Dropbox and share it with a number of people, just in case. Some ideas of who to include:
- Phone and email details for senior staff. Make sure to use details you’ll be able to contact them on over the break, not their regular work contact details.
- Contact details for your accountant and bookkeeper
- Contact details for someone who has a key to your premises and can access the building in case of emergency
