Running the business

Where the day goes

Between opening and locking up, the work you love is only part of the day. The rest is admin, and it rarely arrives as one thing.

Ask a salon, studio or workshop owner where the day goes and you will usually hear about the work itself: the cuts, the classes, the commissions, the customer in the chair or at the bench. Ask again at closing time and you get a different answer, and it is rarely one thing. It is the build up of small jobs, none of which is worth complaining about on its own.

Between opening and locking up there are messages to answer, a booking to move, a reminder somebody meant to send, an invoice that has not gone out, a deposit to check, a gift card nobody can find the record of, and the receipts in the drawer that will need sorting before the accountant asks. Each one takes a moment. None of them is the job. Together they take the evening.

The admin nobody counts

Picture a week with a notepad, writing down every small job that is not the work itself. The one that keeps coming back is a version of “can you just check”: check the diary, check whether they paid, check what we told them last time.

It arrives by message, by email and at the desk. It is asked by customers and by the team. It is asked because the answer lives in a different place from the question, which is why no amount of good intentions stops it.

The question is not the problem. The problem is that answering it means a person has to stop what they are doing and go and look.

Why it compounds

Each small job costs more than the moment it takes, because it lands on someone who was in the middle of something. In a business where the work is hands on, being in the middle of something is the point. The interruption is not the moment itself. It is the moment plus getting back to where you were.

• A booking request in an email has to be copied into the diary before it is real
• A payment on the card reader has to be matched to a customer by hand
• An invoice raised at the end of the week has to be built from memory of what was done
• Anything not written down straight away is carried in someone’s head until it is

What actually helps

Three things, none of them complicated.

Give every request somewhere to land that is not a person. An enquiry that goes straight into one inbox, with a reply drafted for someone to approve, does not need transcribing. You get to it when you get to it, not when it interrupts you.

Let the routine jobs run themselves. A reminder before the booking, a thank you after it, an invoice raised from the booking itself. These are obvious and hard to do consistently, because each is one more thing to remember at the exact moment everyone is busiest.

Keep one record. If the booking, the payment and the messages all sit on the same customer, “can you just check” becomes a glance instead of a search, and the books stay current because every payment already landed in the right place.

What does not help

Working later. You probably already do, and that is part of why the place works. The failure is structural, not personal, and the fix has to be structural too.

Neither does adding another app nobody has time to open. If the new thing does not live where the work already happens, it becomes one more place to check, and you have made it worse. That is why Freemi Custom puts bookings, payments, customers, the inbox and the books in one system, set up around how you already work.

Your services and prices, opening hours, team and booking rules. Freemi Custom is set up around them, and if your business needs something more, talk to us.

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