Business cover when on holiday?

Brassedoff

Jamie_Carter wrote: »

Some companies still have a summer shut down. So you could post a message on the home page in big bold letters (as well as a message at the checkout, if you know how to do that), saying something like:

We would like to advise all our customers that XXXXXX is on summer shut down between the dates of xxxx and xxxx. All orders will be dispatched as soon as possible on return.

What you could also do is take a laptop and headset with you. Make sure that you can get wifi at the hotel. Then set up Skype as well as the answerphone service. Then divert the business phone number to your Skype number. This will probably mean setting some time aside each day to check messages, and return calls. And you would obviously be able to reply to e-mails also. If you do this, then also state on the message on the home page that if customers need to call, then to leave a message, and calls will be returned within 24 hours.

It wouldn't be a holiday then

Jamie_Carter

Brassedoff wrote: »

It wouldn't be a holiday then

Yes it would. I used to take full advantage of the time whilst waiting for my wife to get ready to go out for the evening. And most of the time I was finished before she was ready.

honeypop

paulwf wrote: »

Now might be a good time to document all your procedures and put them in a folder somewhere? Go through it with someone you can trust so you have an emergency backup plan in place. You might not design it so that someone else can run the site but it could help if you're stuck in hospital for a week and need someone to stop orders being taken on the site or something like that. The more backup plans you have the easier it will be if something goes wrong.

If you had something like this in place, it would be easy to hand over to a Virtual Assistant when you want to take time off in future.

As a VA, I am currently covering peoples businesses to keep them ticking over while they are on their summer holiday or taking time off with the children for school holidays. Majority of it can be done remotely, we can update web pages, take calls, respond to emails etc, but if you need things packing/sending then a search for a local VA would find you someone who is better located for physical help.

You say you have numerous varied passwords to ecommerce carts, accounts software, webmail etc. VA's deal with this for other businesses all the time, it's what we are used to, as well as creating prompt invoices, emailing customers...anything that is required to keep your business running as usual - it really does sound like you need a VA, it's what we are there for. And obviously I'm not saying me, there are lots of us out there. An ideal extra pair of hands when you are too busy or need to take time out of the business for any reason, but without employing someone.