Coping with Easter and no beds!
“Oh shit – it is Easter and we are nowhere near ready.”
The decorating isn’t anywhere near finished, the new staff don’t know anything and there isn’t time to train them (what operations manual?) Sound familiar? Read on!
What was worse: we had no beds.
We’d taken all the old, metal bunks down in readiness but the delivery of brand new wooden bunks had somehow gone to Northumberland instead of North Wales and it wasn’t moving very fast. Easter, fully booked and no beds! What did we do?
1) I got the driver’s number and gave him good directions to our door and begged him to be with us by the morning
2) We got the villagers to help. All hands on deck – when those flat-packed bunks arrived, all 48 beds, we had an organised team carrying them up flights of stairs to the empty rooms
3) We sat down with the assembly instructions and figured out Allen keys and ladders and screws and planks
4) I worked out how to put one bunk up and then took it apart again when we realised the ladder was on the wrong side, facing the wall
5) We got a system that was as efficient as time and motion studies could dream of – and we worked all day and all night!
It felt good to succeed, thanks to a lot of help from the community and very dear friends (and some hostelers.) I still have one of the Allen keys as a memento.
The lesson learnt? When in a crisis you will be amazed who will step forward and help, so turn a negative into a positive, forget your pride and ask for help.
And keep cool. Easter will be over soon and you can get back to decorating and train your staff so you can delegate. Easter might be tough but it is a blessing, focusing the mind and getting you back up to speed. The rest of the year would be impossible if it wasn’t for Easter.
So, how to cope with Easter?
Go fast. You and your staff are possibly a little rusty so you’ll have to focus on getting the jobs done. In time.
Don’t try to be perfect, do as much as you can in the allotted time. Time management is critical. By the end of the holiday you’ll be exhausted but working a lot more efficiently.
But hopefully you will have beds.
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