“Omnipresence” vs. “Omni-availability”

Are you always available for your client? Do you take calls in the middle of dinner, during your birthday party, and on your vacation? Do you feel your business needs to be open all the time to ensure that people do not go other places? Your marketing can have omnipresent – you cannot.

It’s important to know that people respect boundaries. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be available for your customers, some industries specifically require people to be available at hours that most of us would not want to work, for example the real estate industry. What is important to the financial health of your business is that the hours you work make sense to the bottom line.

Let’s say you are open Monday’s from 8am to 9 pm. Your overall income for the day pays for you to be open for those hours. If you analyze the income hour by hour and find that only 5 % of your sales come from the first 3 hours you are open you may want to re-evaluate your hours. This is true if that 5% income does not pay to have the store open for those three hours especially since those three hours require ~28% of the cost of running the business for that day.

Now, if you make your business available from 8am all the other morning but close for the 3 hours on Monday’s, you may save up to 5% of your overall operating costs. The neat thing is, your clients that love you and want to purchase from you will come when you are open. If you lose a client because of that hour change, it wasn’t because they were great clients that truly loved what you had to offer.

Remember you are running a business and it should be viable from every perspective.