The hidden cost of a ten minute gap

Ten minutes between appointments feels like nothing. It is a coffee, a tidy up, a look at your phone. It is also the least examined cost in most service businesses, because it never appears on any statement and nobody ever invoices for it.

Six of them in a day is an hour. Five days a week is a working day a month.

Where the gaps come from

Almost all of it comes from rounding. A service that genuinely takes thirty five minutes gets booked as forty five because forty five is a tidy number and the slots line up neatly. That is ten minutes of paid time converted into a gap, repeated every time the service is sold.

The second source is defensive padding. Somebody once overran badly, so a buffer went in, and the buffer stayed long after the overrun stopped happening. Buffers are worth having. Buffers nobody has reviewed in two years are just lost revenue with a good reason attached.

The arithmetic

A stylist charging £45 an hour with six ten minute gaps a day is losing an hour of chargeable time a day. Across a five day week that is five hours, or £225 of capacity that was never available to sell.

Over a working year, allowing for holiday, that is somewhere north of £10,000 of capacity in a single chair. It is not £10,000 of profit, because you would not fill all of it. Filling half of it is still a very good year.

What to do about it

• Time your services honestly for a fortnight. Actual start to actual finish, written down. Most owners find at least one service is ten minutes shorter than the slot it sells and one is fifteen minutes longer.
• Set durations to what the work takes rather than to the nearest quarter hour. A thirty five minute service should be thirty five minutes. Tidy numbers are for price lists, not for diaries.
• Keep buffers where they earn their place. Cleardown between colours, travel between jobs and bay turnaround are real. A blanket ten minutes on everything is not.
• Use the gaps you cannot remove. A ten minute slot is enough for a fringe trim, a patch test, a wheel nut torque check or a quick collection. Make those services bookable and the gap starts paying.
• Let a waitlist see the gaps. A cancellation that leaves a forty minute hole is worth far more filled by somebody waiting than left as a long lunch.

The part that is not about money

Some gaps are load bearing. A day booked wall to wall with no air in it produces tired work, short conversations and a rebooking rate that quietly falls. The goal is not zero gaps. It is knowing which gaps you chose and which ones the software chose for you.

Count them for a week. It is usually the first time anyone has.