Scheduling for Profit
Most Service businesses depend on scheduling their customers, clients, or patients. Whether that is a service call, in-office visit, classes, or health and beauty appointments, taking a second look at how you schedule you may find that you can squeeze more out of the time available and/or significantly reduce down time.
I went to the trusty internet to find out what it thought about the topic, and it provided me with a list of suggestions. While all of these are valid points, I want to dig a little deeper. But here is their list for your consideration:
All industries have their idiosyncrasies that constrain what you can and cannot do, but all ideas should not only be considered when trying to create a more efficient scheduling system, we should also ask ourselves if we can remove the constraint all or most of the time so that we can take advantage of that new idea.
I have a lot of experience in making more efficient scheduling in the Spa and Salon industry than I do in other service industries but let me share with you that I have learned and perhaps you can adapt the lessons to your business.
First, we want to determine what the average length of the service plus cleanup or travel time is as it is done currently. If your service times are all over the map, ask yourself what we can do to reduce those huge variations.
Once we know this average time this then becomes our block for scheduling. If this is too large a block to be practical then we might make an exception and cut that block in half to provide more flexibility for our customer. But what we don’t want is to do is let customers pick anytime that will mess up the efficiency of our schedule.
With Spa services they were mostly 90-minute and 60-minute services which left a lot of 30-minute gaps in our schedule that then became impossible to fill. So, we eliminated our 90-minute services and built our schedules around 60-minute services which allowed us to sell each service at the top of the hour which provided more services back-to-back, AND reduce the downtime.
Second, we should ask ourselves if we are using our most experienced and most expensive employees first or last.
Typical service businesses have a variety of services they offer while some take more skill than others. We should try to utilize our less experienced (and less expensive) employees for all of the easy and common services we deliver.
This not only reduces our costs of labor, it also makes your best technicians available for hard jobs, emergencies, training others, and provides them with more responsibilities.
Third, let’s look at our peak times, days and consider seasonal cycles. The best way to illustrate this is by realizing that:
It can’t always be done, but our goal should always be to move High-Value Customers into Low-Value times, days, and seasons. When we have a good customer during our slowest times, we can spend a little more time with them if needed and focus on keeping them happy. The more frequently we can get these High-Value Customers into Low-Value times, we will free up High-Demand times that are more easily sold to NEW Customers.
To use the Spa example again, Mrs. Smith is a loyal retired Client that comes in for services every Saturday morning. The issue here as that Saturdays are always busy, but Tuesdays are always slow. So, the more “Mrs. Smiths” that we could move to midweek the more available appointments we had available to sell on Saturdays. With diligence this would typically increase monthly revenue by 10-15%.
Lastly, measure Utilization. For weekly utilization create a matrix of hours and days that represents one week. In each block put two numbers; how many labor hours were available and how many of them were sold. This will tell you two things; first, how well you utilized the available hours, and second, where your peak demand is.
From this you can move labor around to better meet that demand.
Conclusion:
To underscore a critical point, the best utilization scheduling will allow MORE time with your High-Value clients and allow your company to open more available time for NEW customers. Win-win.
I find that most businesses create a schedule and let it fill organically, thereby leaving a lot of money and time on the table. Careful control and analysis will allow you to have more efficient use of your labor and make more availability for your customer.
The cost of labor is expensive, and there isn’t a lot you can do about the cost per hour. Where you can play it smart is by utilizing that labor better than your competition does.
It may seem that we frequently refer to data and information collection AND the subsequent analysis. I would argue that every successful company has concluded that collecting information about critical variables (numbers) in their business realizes the decision-making process in improving operations requires the leadership to stop, review and consider making changes to their current operational systems.
The failure to do so forces your company to become “people dependent” versus “systems dependent”. Although this topic is a blog for another day, consider how continuous improvement can yield greater results in both time expended AND bottom-line profitability.
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