The holiday season can be extra stressful for small businesses.

Employees are distracted (at best) and often take vacation time, leaving fewer team members available to manage what tends to be even more work. Your customers are stressed, too, and often have last-minute requests for year-end budget spending.

To help you prepare for a stress-free season, consider the following preparations you can make:

1. Prep your technology: If all goes well, you’ll have a lot of data to process this holiday season! Make sure your technology is humming along. Take a few minutes to check on these things:
   
   a. Has your network been running efficiently? If not, you may need to look at updating your server, or at least running some diagnostics to be sure your drive is appropriately partitioned and running at peak performance.
   
   b. Is your Internet working well? So many people are online this season that if you do not have dedicated Internet, you may see a real slowing down of your access. This can also affect phone quality if you’re using Voice over IP systems. Now’s the time to upgrade to a dedicated Internet service.
   
   c. With more online surfing during this shopping season, be sure that your antivirus is up to date and your backup system is fully operational. One misstep can be disastrous, so take time now to update all your antivirus systems.
   
   d. Do you have someone to turn to if there is a crack in the system? Before you need help is the time to prepare. Reconnect with your IT help desk and be sure your contract is up to date.
    
2. Prep employee access:
   
   a. Just because your assistant needs to be in Connecticut for the holidays doesn’t mean she’s inaccessible. Consider a cloud-based system so that so that critical issues can be resolved, no matter where your team members are.
   
   b. If your phone system has not been updated, you might think about getting a hosted voice platform in place. That will allow each of your employees to have office calls forwarded to their mobile devices, keeping your customers connected when they need you most.
    
3. Prep your mindset: This is probably the most important preparation you can undertake. Something will likely go wrong this season. December is so busy, with so many contracts being negotiated for the new year, so many more sales taking place, so much more activity all happening when the team just wants to take a break and watch football.