Whatever your business may be, from dentist to doctor …consider opening when the other business are closed.
For example, why shouldn’t you open your doors on Sundays, or later in the day, or earlier in the morning – when it suits your customers, not when it suits you!
If you can’t justify hiring extra people to assist, then look at your slowest times of the week, and cut back and shuffle the hours to suit.
We’ve had our local library do this, by opening an hour later each week day, they stay open until 5 on Saturdays – brilliant!
Another example is the traditionally closed Mondays hair salons and barbers – why should you open the same time as every other hairdressers?
Or dentists – close on Tuesday and open on Sunday – you will be amazed how well this works.
How was all this inspired – by needing a dentist on a Sunday while on holidays, and finding only one available in an entire metropolitan area. 1 in a massive city, and they were almost booked solid for the day. The relief of getting in to a dentist on the day that I needed them, rather than having to wait 24 hours meant that I was more than happy to pay a few dollars more.
Look at your trading hours, are you open when your customers want you to be – or do they by-pass you to go to another business when everyone else is open?
Then, once you do shuffle your hours around, don't forget to tell people, advertise the fact and let the public know (at the very least - update your website!)
This post for the B4C was written by Earl Pilkington.
