Do you want to control your own appointments?

Every booking app puts appointments in a diary. What varies, and what almost nobody checks before signing up, is who the diary belongs to afterwards.

There are two questions underneath that, and they are not the same question.

Who the client thinks they booked

When somebody books through a large consumer app, they very often remember the app rather than you. They opened it, they searched, they picked a time. Next month they open the same app, and if you are busy on Thursday they will book somebody else on Thursday, because the app is what they trust and you were one of the options inside it.

When somebody books through a page that carries your name, your services and your prices, they booked you. The next booking starts by thinking about you rather than about a directory.

Both can be true at once, and for most businesses both should be. Being findable somewhere you are not already known is genuinely valuable, especially when you are starting. The mistake is letting it be the only way anybody reaches you, because then the relationship is rented.

What the second question costs

The second question is what each booking costs, and specifically whether the cost is attached to the client or to the transaction.

A per new client fee looks small on one booking. Run it forward. A salon adding twenty new clients a month, each charged a one off new client fee of around £15, is paying £300 a month, £3,600 a year, for introductions. Some of those clients would have found them anyway through a recommendation. There is no practical way to tell which, which is the part that grates.

The alternative is not a world without fees. Card processing costs money wherever you take it, and any platform has to be paid for somehow. The question is only whether the cost scales with the number of people who find you, which punishes growth, or sits in a flat subscription and a disclosed card rate, which does not.

How to check who owns your diary

Four questions, and you can answer all four this afternoon.

1. 1Can you export your full client list, with contact details and appointment history, right now, without asking anybody? If the answer is that you would have to request it, you do not own it in any way that matters.
2. 2Is there a booking link with your name on it that you can put on your own Instagram profile, Google listing and shop window? If every route in goes through somebody else's brand, every route in can be reprised.
3. 3When a client rebooks, who gets paid for the introduction? An introduction fee on someone who has been coming to you for two years is a fee for nothing.
4. 4If you left tomorrow, what would you take with you? That is the honest version of all three questions above.

What to do about it if the answers were uncomfortable

Not leave, necessarily. Diversify. The businesses that come out of this well tend to do the same unglamorous things.

• Get a booking link of your own and put it everywhere you control. Instagram bio, Google Business Profile, email signature, the card you hand over, the window. Where the link lives decides who owns the booking.
• Export your client list now and keep exporting it. Whatever platform you use, a current copy in your own hands is the difference between a supplier and a landlord.
• Rebook people while they are in front of you. A client who leaves with the next appointment already in the diary does not need introducing to you again by anybody.
• Keep the listings. Just stop being only there.

Youzse gives you a booking page under your own name, and the client list is yours to export whenever you want. Youzse also runs a marketplace, at 0% commission on new clients, which is included in the subscription rather than charged per introduction. Being honest about it, that marketplace is younger and carries less consumer traffic than the large ones, so it is worth having rather than worth relying on. The part that matters is that a client who arrives through it is your client from the first appointment.