Tips To Prepare For This Years Festive Season

7 Tips to Prepare For This Years Holiday Season

Holiday season is a unique experience for everyone, for some it means a time to relax and recover from the year that has passed. For others it’s peak period for business and this means the busiest time of year. Regardless of how you’re positioned, here are some tips to best prepare yourself for the upcoming Christmas period.

1. Learn from the past

Re-assess what has happened in the previous year, think about what worked well both personally and for your business. What family traditions to repeat this year? What business processes were successful? What do you remember from last year as a hindrance? Or what can you remember wishing you had done?

These lessons from the past are often all you need to prepare and plan for the perfect holiday season. It will also help, as naturally this time you will be motivated to take on more learning’s to for next year.

2. Plan for the worst

Things always seem more likely to go wrong at this time of the year therefore it’s important to be ready for the worst-case scenario. This means having a plan for business continuity, protecting your business should there be a natural or technological disaster, or perhaps you need to be prepared for casual staff to call in sick with that Christmas virus which seems to be going around.

On a personal note it could mean making sure the family car has been serviced before the holiday road trip you have been planning all year. If you are ready for the worst, then you should be well prepared to deal with most situations as they arise.

3. Ensure your out of office email is setup

This tip is very easy, but that also makes it easy to forget! You could be going away for anywhere between 1-4 weeks, maybe longer if your lucky. Therefore its important that anyone with urgent requests can be pointed in the right direction. Your “out of office” reply should provide people with the information to continue with their enquiry in your absence. Apart from providing a good business experience, it also means sales are less likely to fall through the gaps.

4. Back everything up

Make sure you don’t lose any of the hard work you completed leading up to your time off. Ensure all your work is saved and backed-up. Office 365, for instance, doesn’t come with back up included; iseek can provide office 365 back-up if you want to contact us to discuss options. There will be nothing worse than coming back to work to find large amounts of work missing.

5. Take time to reflect on the year and plan for the year ahead

The Christmas holidays provide a good opportunity to look back on the year and reflect on what has been accomplished. Time away from work can be the perfect opportunity to look at the year’s results holistically and understand where the business succeeded and where there is room for improvement. If the years results are not providing enough insight into your business then there is an immediate opportunity to improve with better reporting.

Be sure to engage friends and family for a discussion on the year. Importantly taking note of the positives that came out of the year and the recommendations or changes to be made going forward. This is relevant both personally and in a business sense.

6. Connect and Catch Up

Even if this time of year means peak season for your business, that may not be the case for many of your friends, family, colleagues and customers. Take the opportunity to reconnect with those you haven’t spoken to in a while.

You may find business opportunities in networks that you haven’t recently explored, or maybe you will end up in a long overdue catch up with friend you haven’t seen in a while. Both of these scenarios are made extremely accessible because of the social gatherings and parties that come with the festive season, so take advantage of them.

7. Relax and enjoy the time off!

So after all of that socialising, reading, thinking and planning, the most important tip is to relax. Use the holiday period for what it’s intended, so whatever relaxation means to you make sure you take advantage of the break.

Ideally you will come back to work refreshed, re-energised and bursting with new ideas.