The Joys and Challenges of Owning a Business at Christmas! 🎄🎅🏽

The festive season is my absolute favourite time of year, I love the excitement, joy and celebrations! Another positive is; it also brings for many aesthetic businesses, a significant boost in patients! However, having your own business over Christmas can also be demanding, requiring lots of pre-planning and hard work. Who else gets to Christmas Day completely burnt out?!

Let’s be fair, christmas brings a surge of patient demand! The increase in volume of patients means a significant increase in our working hours, increased stress and an increased risk of things not running as smoothly as we are used to! Through eight Christmas’s in aesthetics, I’ve managed to find things that work for my business (and things that don’t work for my business!). I thought I would share!

One thing I do is place a bulk stock order at the end of November on consumables; things like needles, gauze, clinisept, gloves etc! If ANYTHING gets forgotten during a huge Christmas order it always tends to be one of those! I can remember a mad dash down the high street one Christmas to try and find a pharmacy that had gloves in stock 🫠 Even if you order a surplus to what you needed, it’s stock that we use within clinic all year around and isnt hugely expensive, so you haven’t outlayed too much!

It’s no secret that I am awful with technology (however, I’m becoming a dab hand at canva!) but having the increase in hours in clinic means I lose hours on other areas of the business. My social media always used to drop off on the run up to Christmas, and over Christmas too! As I enjoyed a much needed break with my family! In my business we batch create content, prepare before & after images and reels in November to be scheduled over December. We may chop and change this slightly but as a whole Decembers posts are sorted, scheduled and ready to go! No missed days or leaving work at 8pm to realise you haven’t done anything on socials!

Finally, we ask all patients to make bookings via our online booking system. We temporarily stop bookings via social media, telephone or email (unless urgent) to help streamline the booking process, allow staff to utilise their time better and reduce the risk of incorrect bookings/no shows! It actually free’s up SO much time not going back and forth over an email!

If your anything like me, I CANNOT wait to create that festive atmosphere in my clinic! It gives us a great opportunity to create a positive and memorable appointment for our patients! We fully embrace the festive tunes, mince pies and Christmas scents in our clinic! It’s personally my favourite time to be working in the clinic!

Enjoy the Christmas build up everyone and if you have any tips or tricks to surviving the Christmas rush post them below 👇🏼🎄⭐️