Making sure stock and staff meet demand
There is nothing worse than having to let a customer down when you are face to face with them. There is nothing worse because, one, it is a very embarrassing thing to do, and two, because it might make them never want to come and bring their custom to your business ever again.
So make sure that you assess your projected public intake on a day-to-day basis and ensure that you address it by ensuring you bring in both enough staff to be able to tend to the public you let through your doors and enough stock to be able to provide them with exactly what they need.
What this means first of all, especially during the festive season (which is, as you are probably aware, extremely forthcoming), is ensuring that you rota staff on to work during the peak times and you make it clear that this rota needs to be stuck by.
A good idea when it comes to doing this is to ensure that you do rota a few weeks in advance so that everybody that you employ, especially the casual staff, know when they are expected in work. You should also ensure that your members of staff are giving the right amount of notice before taking time off so as to ensure you are never left wanting when it comes to having enough staff working to meet the demands of the public.
What this also means is that you should ensure that you have everything in stock that the members of the public that are your customers need, whenever they ask for and need it. For instance, if you run a restaurant and have been either asked by a customer to put a specific dish on your menu, or you know that a regular customer likes a specific dish, then you should ensure this dish is available.
Simply, you must do these things if you want to either turn the member of the public that enters your premises into a customer of yours, or you want to keep them as a customer in the future.
Making sure your premises is safe FOR those that enter it
Something that is more important than ensuring you forge custom out of the public that enters into your premises is ensuring that they are kept safe when they do so. You should absolutely make sure that this is the case because, one, it is the right thing to do as a human being, and two, because, by not doing so, you make your business liable to being landed in serious trouble.
For instance, if a member of the public was to slip on something left lying about in your premises and then injured as a result, you would find yourself in the midst of a very hot legal battle.
To be more specific, you would find yourself battling a trip and fall lawsuit, and if you were truly at fault then you would undoubtedly be fighting a losing battle. You would find yourself having to try and prove fault in the matter.
You’d have to hear your business tarnished by the general rules of the matter. And you’d have to claim on your liability insurance (provided you have taken such cover out) which will then increase the premiums the next time you seek to take out such cover.
But, you can quash the need to be engulfed in such a battle in the first place by making your premises safe from this type of accident at all times. This means ensuring everything is put back exactly where it needs to be and not left lying about, and this means putting wet floor signs down whenever a floor has become, well, wet. By doing this you would not need to have the tedious relationship that business owners have long since had with cases of slip-and-fall accidents.
Making sure your premises is safe FROM those that enter it
When you open your doors to the public, you open your doors to ALL the public. This means, quite simply, then anybody could enter your premises. And, this means that members of the public can enter your premises in order to not enter into a business negotiation with you but to steal from you. Because of this disappointing but very real fact, you need to ensure your premises is protected against theft and other security risks visitors might bring with them.
First of all, you should have security cameras fitted around your premises and focused on the actual areas of it that play host to some of your business’s most valuable possessions, which could just be a till full of cash.
By doing this you will scare any potential burglars off as they will not want to be caught on camera doing the thieving. By doing this you will also give yourself more of a chance of catching burglars in the long run if they were to actually make it out of your premises with something that belongs to you.
Second of all, to deter this kind of member of the public entering your premises through the front door in the first place, you should have strict security measures in place. This could mean hiring actual security to stand guard at your door and keep an eye on everybody that enters your premises, especially those that they do not recognise. Or, this could mean starting a strict sign in, sign out policy where members of the public are asked to provide details about themselves when they enter your building.
Opening their doors to the public is something that brings businesses added headaches, but sometimes it is something that simply has to be done. If your business simply has to open its doors in this way, then make sure to take the advice above if you want to protect it.
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