Your customers are planning December now. Do they know your dates?

Most service businesses settle their December dates in December. Their customers plan much earlier. The homeowner who wants a geyser replaced, a garden cleared or a room painted before family arrives is deciding who to use in November, and they pick someone who can tell them when.

If you cannot say when your last pre-Christmas slot is, or when you are back in January, you are asking customers to guess. Plenty of them will simply ask someone else.

This year's calendar

December 2026 is tighter than it looks. Schools close for learners around 9 December, according to the Department of Basic Education's 2026 calendar, and plenty of families go away soon after. The Day of Reconciliation falls on Wednesday 16 December, which splits the week. Christmas is on a Friday, and the Day of Goodwill lands on Saturday 26 December, so most staff get no extra day off for it, as BusinessTech pointed out last December.

Retailers already see customers planning ahead. Massmart said this month that Google searches for Black Friday were 30% higher over the past three months than a year earlier, and its marketing vice-president, Charmagne Mazhindu, put it simply: "Black Friday is no longer only about what happens on the day." Our view is that service customers behave the same way about the holidays. The jobs that must be done before Christmas get booked in November.

A customer who knows your dates can plan around you. One who does not will plan around someone else.

Decide your dates this week

Sit down with your diary and your team and settle these before the end of October:

• Your last booking day for pre-Christmas work. Work back from your busiest week. If a typical job needs ten days from quote to finish, say so: book by a set date and it is done before the 16th.
• Your closing day and your first day back. Pick them now, even if they might move by a day.
• Your suppliers' dates. Ask when they close and when their last orders go out. Materials ordered after their cut-off wait until January, and so does your customer.
• Who answers enquiries while you are closed. Even if the answer is nobody, decide what customers will see.

Then put the dates where customers look. Add them to the bottom of every quote that goes out from now on. Set the away message in the WhatsApp Business app to give your reopening date. On Google, special hours cover public holidays and closures of up to six days in a row; for a longer break, Google's own guidance is to mark the business temporarily closed, then switch it back when you reopen.

None of this takes long. It turns December from a month where enquiries pile up unanswered into one where customers book the slots you actually have, and January starts with work already waiting.