5 Ways to Prep Your Event Business for the New Year

The holiday season is fast approaching and before we know it, it’ll be 2022. That means New Year’s resolutions: new goals, habits, and positive changes are right around the corner. But the New Year isn’t just for reinventing and improving yourself. It’s also the perfect time to revamp your business and prepare for all the awesome events the new year will bring your way! Take advantage of the down time around the holidays and give your events business some TLC, so everything will be in order before the spring season begins.

Create or Refresh Your Website

If you are waiting for a sign to create a website for your event company, this is it!

If you talk to your friends, family, coworkers, and clients about how they find companies and services for, well, anything, I can guarantee that most of them will say that they checked the Internet. From restaurants to doctors to roofers to caterers, the Internet is the first stop for most people. If you don’t have an online presence, you’re missing out on a huge client base. Whether you hire a web developer to build a custom site or you use DIY a service like Squarespace, the most important thing is that your clients can find you online.

If you already have a website, now is a great time to review and refresh your site. This could mean updating your home page, adding new client success stories, updating old photos, and/or working on your site’s SEO. Keeping your site’s content and visuals up-to-date will help cultivate confidence with your clients, and keeping on top of your SEO will ensure your clients can find you.

Unsure of where to start with SEO? No worries, we have a guide right here.

Clean and Organize Your Warehouse

Spring may be a great time for everyone else to do a deep clean, but spring is the start of the busy season for many event companies and therefore not the best time for this. Instead of embracing spring cleaning, event pros may be better served to do a holiday season cleaning. Now is the perfect time to tackle repair and refinishing projects, re-organize your warehouse, and oust the dust bunnies.

Review and Update Your Inventory

As you’re cleaning and organizing your warehouse, you may take note of items that just aren’t used very often. Take note of these items! Now is a fantastic time to purge underutilized inventory items to make room for new pieces, or brainstorm new, creative ways to use them.

Reviewing item usage is incredibly easy for our Goodshuffle Pro users, and there are a few different ways to investigate how often a particular item is used: over a period of time, by Project, and by item type (such as chairs or tables). Not only can you see how often something is used, but you can also see the ROI on the item. Talk about a fantastic way to forecast your spending for the next year!

Send Out Greeting Cards

The holiday season is the perfect time to let your valued customers, venues, and partners know that you appreciate them — with the added benefit of keeping your company in their minds for the upcoming busy season. You can do custom postcards (for example, including pictures of your team and highlights from the year), or keep it simple with a “Happy Holidays” card. Either way, your clients and partners will be reminded of your company and appreciate the personal touch!

Invest In and Implement New Software

Slower business during the holiday season provides you and your team with extra time to implement new software and procedures. This could be as simple as getting a password manager and instituting new SOPs around password usage, or a bigger project like upgrading to a new inventory management system.

If you’re considering a new inventory management software, you’ll want to check out all the time-saving benefits and integrations that your software of choice can bring to the table. As we saw with item usage, Goodshuffle Pro can also save you tons of time by integrating with Quickbooks Online to manage your finances, integrating with Stripe so that you can securely accept payments and send out invoices, and by giving you clear reports on your Projects and items so you always know your best-selling inventory pieces.

Just because business slows down doesn’t mean your team needs to slow down too. There’s a lot of upkeep and improvement projects that are perfect to tackle during the “slow season.” Get your business in tip-top shape during the holiday lull so that your event rental business is ready to take off this spring!