Writing for people who run service businesses
Product updates, practical guides and what we are learning from salons, garages, clinics and trades across the UK.
47 articles
Is your booking page usable by everyone?
Roughly one in five people in the UK has a disability. If your booking page is hard for them to use, that is both a legal question and a fifth of your market.
Compliance,Client data on your team's personal phones
Half the client contact in a small business happens on somebody's own phone. That is convenient right up to the day they leave, lose it or fall out with you.
Compliance,Special category data in a small clinic or studio
Aesthetics, tattooing, physio, podiatry and massage all collect health information. That is a different category of data with a higher bar and most small practices have never been told.
Compliance,Do you want to get paid on the job?
Most trades finish the work, invoice at the weekend and wait a month. The gap is a habit rather than a rule and on domestic work it is an expensive one.
Trades,Rotas, holiday and the weeks everybody forgets
Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks and most small businesses discover in November that three people have booked the same fortnight in December.
Staff,Do you want to take payment on your phone?
Taking a card on the phone in your pocket is now ordinary. What it actually involves, what it costs against a card machine and where it genuinely does not fit.
Payments,Who on your team should see what
Most small businesses give everyone full access because setting up permissions felt like a job for later. Later usually arrives as an unpleasant surprise.
Staff,Do you want to control your own appointments?
There is a difference between being listed somewhere and owning your diary. It shows up in who the client thinks they booked and in what the next booking costs you.
Bookings,Tips and service charges after the Tipping Act
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act changed how tips have to be handled. If you take tips on card, there are things you now have to do rather than choose to do.
Staff,Do you want your garage diary to fill itself?
Every garage already knows when its customers are next due. Almost none of them act on it systematically, which is why quiet weeks happen to businesses with full books.
Garages,MOT reminders are the easiest revenue in a garage
Every car you have ever tested has a date attached to it. A garage that contacts owners before that date fills its own diary. Most garages wait for the phone to ring.
Garages,Do you want to stop chasing lesson payments?
Driving instructors lose money in two places: pupils who cancel on the morning and lessons that get taught before they get paid for. Both are fixable with a rule.
Payments,