Small businesses that rely on holiday sales to generate a profit for the year generally rely on seasonal employees to help generate those profits. Good planning helps to insure that a company keeps its costs down during the holidays so it can maximize those profits. But how does a small business accurately project how many temporary employees it will need for the upcoming holiday season? As with any business projections, there is a lot of trial and error involved and there is also a lot at stake.
Get Your Funding In Place
The holiday season comes and goes in the span of a few months, which means that it may be difficult for you to be able to collect all of your holiday cash before the New Year. If you are involved in a business that invoices clients with credit terms, then you may have to wait to see your profits.
The problem is that your seasonal employees are not going to wait to get paid, so you need to have your funding in place before the holidays begin. A good financing option to make your holiday payroll is to do business with Business Credit and Capital. The financial experts at Business Credit and Capital will help you to establish a special line of credit that you can draw from to meet your payroll needs. It is the ideal solution when your cash flow is impaired.
Look At Last Year’s Numbers
The biggest mistake small business owners make with holiday personnel is to look at the number of temporary employees they hired the previous year and then just hire the same amount this year. But was last year’s staffing the right number? Did you have a high number of temporary employees call in and cause productivity to drop?
You need to compare your productivity numbers to the staffing that you had in order to determine how effective last year’s staffing numbers were. If you needed more staffing last year, then take that into account this year. Do not just trust last year’s staffing numbers without checking productivity as well.
Check Your Revenue Trends For This Year
How have sales been this year? If you are experiencing 20 percent growth this year over last year, then you can expect a very good holiday season and your seasonal staffing numbers need to reflect that. If this year is off from last year, then you should try and conserve cash by lowering your temporary staffing for this holiday season.
You should also look at industry projections for the holidays as well. Is there a product being released for the holidays that is supposed to be extremely popular? If that is the case, then you will need to have extra personnel on hand to make sure that you maximize your holiday profits.
Offer Extra To Your Current Employees First
It is always cheaper to pay your current employees a little more to work extra during the holidays than to hire temporary employees. To help keep your personnel costs down this holiday season, offer extra work to your current staff and then use that to cut back on the number of temporary employees that you hire.
Every year, small business owners wrestle with personnel projections for the holiday season. Each temporary employee hired needs to bring in a financial return or the holiday profits will suffer. That is why a good small business owner needs to develop an effective way to project holiday staffing needs and then bring in staff that will enhance profitability for the busiest shopping season of the year.