Holiday Rush

The holidays are approaching and many businesses are gearing up for their busiest time of the year. For some retailers, this is a make or break season. Obviously, I hope most make it!

With my previous bagel stores in NJ and Pennsylvania, the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve were our two biggest sales days of the year. It is something that I never quite understood, as we never really set out to be busy on those days. During my tenure as a part owner, we didn't really develop any holiday themed specials, with the exception of making a red bagel dough and a green bagel dough and creating red/green marbled bagels for sale during the Christmas season.

In hindsight, I was guilty of not properly planning for the holiday season and I let some opportunities for profit maximization slip away. It would have been easy to develop some better holiday themed specials to garner more sales and profits out of the 500 or so customers that would come into our store each of those days. Sales were always good on those days, but could they have been better?

Why did I squander this opportunity? It is truly a lame excuse, but it stems from the first day before Thanksgiving that I experienced. We kept running out of bagels. I had my oven filled to capacity from 4:00 AM until 10:00 AM and I still kept running out of bagels. Some customers wouldn't wait and they would leave the store early. So the following years, my only focus was making sure that I didn't run out of bagels again. I was focusing too much on my operations and forgetting my responsibilities as a business owner to maximize our marketing efforts and set financial benchmarks for success.

It is this tunnel vision of focusing on one area of business development that often keeps small business owners from maximizing success during the holidays. Business owners need to be holistic in their management if they really want to have a successful holiday season. Keep a balance between developing marketing plans to get more customers, the operational plans to maximize your productivity during this season and measure the financial performance to ensure you are achieving financial success.

My hope is that more small business will reap the benefits of the holiday rush this year. It can be a hectic period for retailers, but it can also be very profitable. Make the best of it and have a joyful season!