Home | e-Magazine | e-Products | e-Books | Handmade Originals | Licensed Art

Stacking your calendar is scheduling enough shows to protect your business against cancellations and low show sales. This process will help ensure that your direct sales business has consistent cash flow and growth. In a direct sales business, if your shows aren’t booked close together your business will not have enough cash flow or growth to survive. This happens frequently in direct sales because owners fail to plan accordingly for cancellations and they don’t book their shows close enough together.

Understand Your Calendar
The main components to stacking your calendar are booking your shows close together and over booking your calendar. More times than not, one third of your monthly shows will cancel or reschedule. Cancellations are a part of this business no matter what your product. What this means is, if you want to hold three shows per week then you need to book four shows a week. The worst that’ll happen is that you’ll hold all four shows one week, make some money, and then you’ll end up with two cancellations the following week; it’s the way it is in this business.

Weekend warriors will need to double and triple book the weekends; filling each available time slot with a show in order to meet your monthly show goal. If you expect to profit from your endeavor, then your monthly show goal needs to include enough shows to cover cancellations. Also, when your shows are book closely together, you have more opportunities to meet more people to book more parties and to meet new prospects; residual income is a lovely bonus.

Is it possible to profit from a weekend direct sales business? Yes, one could easily do six shows each weekend. From ten in the morning to six at night you could book four different parties on Saturday, and more on Sunday.

The first step is to really understand your calendar. Your calendar should work for you, instead of you working in disarray. In order to understand your calendar, you must take a very close look at it, in advance, and decide when you can physically perform a show outside of your home and when you have other obligations.

Block Out Important Dates
To do this, you’ll want to get an 8” x 10” calendar, sit down and put a big red x through the days that you absolutely can not work outside of your home; not even for a few hours. On the remaining days, make two lines in each box dividing each day into three parts; morning, afternoon and night. In the appropriate day/time blocks, pencil in your appointments, children’s activities, meetings and special occasions.

Figure Out Your Money Days
What you have left are the days, and times that you can commit to holding shows. These are called your money days. Keep in mind that your show, from start to finish, shouldn’t be more than 2-3 hours. Now color your money days in with a green highlighter as green represents money; we love visuals.

For instance, if all of Saturday is free, then color the entire day green. If you have a 1 pm Dentist appointment on Saturday, then you’d probably only color Saturday evening green. You’ll need to give your business some of your weekend time as this is when most of your hostesses will want to host their party’s. However, week night theme shows could increase your week night show average. Complete this calendar process for three consecutive months and maintain it by completing another month at the end of each month. Without calendar control, you have no control over your businesses cash flow.

Book Your Shows
Now that you know when you are available, pick up the phone and start calling all of your contacts. You’ll want to book six to eight shows inside the next two weeks and then the following two weeks, and so on, until you have a third more parties booked than you actually want to hold over the course of the next three months. I know, most are thinking two weeks is too soon, but it’s not; it just takes a little creativity. Lunch parties, impromptu parties and office parties are just some of the options available to you. During your initial two weeks, you’ll need to be right on top of things to ensure everything goes smoothly. Invitations will need to go out and you’ll need to keep in close connect with the hostess. In order for this process to work, you must start with the up coming two weeks; it’s the foundation, so dig deep and you’ll come out on top.