Ep. 25 Your Business is Closed – What now???

Your Business is Closed – What now???

If your business has to close, whether it is due to COVID closures, power outages, or other issues, how do you manage to let your customers know? Do you have special restrictions? Are you offering delivery or digital services? After closures and an emergency power outage at Sean’s museum Torie Mathis and her cohost, Sean talk about what steps are required to communicate with customers. From your website to your Google page, how to ensure you are doing everything that needs to be done?

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(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 25

[00:00:00] Torie: It’s really hard to remember how to do or what to do when all of these happened. So,

Hey, Hey, welcome to Smart AF on your host Torie Mathis, we have got a great show for you today. So let’s get started. So we had a hurricane come through. I’m not serious where we were at, but enough of a storm that it knocked the power out to all kinds of business. And the power was taken out at the museum at Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. And you’ve been closed for a week. 

[00:00:39] Sean: Yeah, a little over a week at this point. It’s been absolutely brutal, but from a view that I don’t normally get to see, I did notice it quite a few people pay attention and want to visit the museum or, you know before they, they be able to see online and Google and all these places going and checking and making sure that the is open, you know, they just go and then I don’t necessarily know they’re there until after I see the numbers at the end of the day.

But with the museum not being able to be open for over the week because we don’t have any lights, so it’s dark in there. People have been reaching out left and right. Wanting to know what’s going on, which is pretty neat because I mean, I can tell people are looking and trying to go there. You can’t most likely guarantee, to let every single person know that, you know, there, there might be an issue with your business, but I really tried to make an effort to do that. And by doing that. So you update your Google business page. 

[00:01:44] Torie: Well, I think this is a good time to talk about systems. So because things like this happen, it would probably be nice to have some type of system in place because it’s really hard to remember how to do or what to do when all of these happen. So if you had some type of checklist that you made to say, like it’s something happened, like your business had to close down, Or you had some restrictions in place or something if you put together some type of system.

So whoever’s in charge of that knows like what they’re supposed to do. It’s a little bit easy for us, cause we are the ones that do it, but if you had a little bit larger business or if you’re just not the one that does this all the time, it’s probably a good idea to like take note of these things.

This is possibly a process that you need to put in place and at least have it written down somewhere so that you know where to go. And then what to do when this kind of thing happens. So storm happens, museum’s out, what’d you 

[00:02:37] Sean: I updated Google business page so you can update posts and all that kind of stuff.

So, Let people know what was going on there. Just as simple out of power, we’re not going to be able to open for a little bit a little while. 

[00:02:49] Torie: So is there a place in your Google business for an announced. 

[00:02:53] Sean: It’s a post 

[00:02:54] Torie: it’s a post. Is there a way to like pin it to the top? Or how do you make sure that people see that? 

[00:02:59] Sean: It’s the most recent?

So you’re not going to want to then after you do something, that’s important information back it up with less important information that could normally just be like filler type stuff. You’re going to leave the important one on Google business. And that’s it. Okay. Until the status changes. 

[00:03:17] Torie: So is there, if you come upon the map, are you coming up and it’s showing that you’re closed or that there’s restrictions there as well?

[00:03:23] Sean: Yes. Okay. Yeah. So you can go in and actually change the hours and all that and show that it’s closed as well as putting the posts on there. So if anybody searches your business like that, and you pull up on Google, it’ll show the posts saying. We’re not able to open right now because there’s no lights when you’re talking like Facebook and that kind of stuff.

Obviously, I have posts going out on that all the time. And so the important one would get buried unless it pinned at the top. And in this case, I did pin that one to the top. So it’s always the first one. You see if you actually go to the museum’s business page. But again, that would require somebody to actually go specifically to the museum’s Facebook page to see that if they just catch it in their feed or something it’s could be long gone.

So it’s not a hundred percent, but it is important. The most important thing, well, not the most important thing, but another important thing is to update your website because if again, people are. Trying to find out stuff about your business. There, most likely what you have out there, shouldn’t be sending them back to their home or back to your home, which is your website.

And then you have it listed there saying whatever the update is. And again, in my case, it was the museums. 

[00:04:41] Torie: So when you put it on your website, what did you, cause you want to put it somewhere where you would call it above the fold, which is an old newspaper term for, you know, above the fold of the newspaper, but on a website that would be before anybody has to scroll.

And so I think you have to think of where to put things like this on your website, high up and also on mobile so that people see it. Cause it’s really easy to overlook the placement of it. So where did you put that on? 

[00:05:06] Sean: I put it right at the top. So where it would normally say, you know, we’re open seven days a week, it says we’re closed.

And, and I gave this specific reason, cause it’s kind of weird that we would be closed when normally everything says we’re open seven days a week. But then, you know, there’s one more way I can reach people. And that was through email. And then capturing people’s emails that have, you know, care about learning what’s going on with the museum.

And I was able to send them an email and let them know that we’re not able to be open right now. And I let them know that as the status changes, we, you know, there’ll be the first to know. But to take it even farther because the museum is a 5 0 1 C three nonprofit we rely on admission. So not only let people know that we’re not able to open, but I could actually ask for, additional help that people may be willing to go, Hey, you know, this museum is struggling because they can’t let people in and just reach out to them. And if they want to then do something a little bit more, I’d give them that outlet to do it.

[00:06:06] Torie: And so you would do that by email now. So you actually, we actually just got a text, like what, like a couple of minutes ago, not too long ago that the power just came back on. So now you have to reverse your process. So what are you going to do now? 

[00:06:23] Sean: A little so now I’ll remove everything that says that we’re closed create new updates, saying, yay, we’re open. And then I’ll send it in an email to let everybody know what the newest update is. 

[00:06:35] Torie: So we talked about something though this weekend, because we were supposed to have something at the museum on Halloween. And though we weren’t expecting it to be a really big turnout. We still were expecting to have some people out, which meant that we were gonna, you know, increase our profits for that day.

You also lost over a week of people coming in there. So a really nice thing that you can do when something like this happens is figuring out how you can turn this into. A way to get people out. I think anytime that you can have an excuse to make an event, anytime you can have an excuse to have something special, especially when it’s something to support you.

People want to come out and support other businesses. So this is a really good opportunity also for you to do something special to announce that you are back open. So didn’t you guys talk about something that you were going to do? 

[00:07:21] Sean: So the plan is I’m going to play on words a little bit, because when you go into the museum, usually all the cars are closed up, meaning none of the hoods are open.

So I’m going to go in there. I’m going to open every singlehood of every single car and we’ll be hoods up opened up. Not that it takes a whole lot of effort or anything, but some people definitely want to see the engine compartments. They want to see what those motors look like. And normally they’re, they’re closed.

The cars look better, you know, with the mall closed up just when people are taking photos and that kind of stuff. So I can open them if I’m there and let people see inside of them, but that’s not the normal case, so people can come back. Whether they’ve been there, you know, two weeks ago, come back and see something.

That’ll look completely different in there. And it’s something we’ve never done before. Be it’s just something different. 

[00:08:16] Torie: I think that’s good to take it an opportunity. Anytime you can, to invite people back. If you have a reason to invite people back, you know, whether you’re a pizza place and you know, you have a new pizza or a new beer on draft or you’re, you know, a car museum and your power was out and now you want everybody to come in.

Anytime you can create a reason and events something special. Everybody always wants to go out and do something. So if you give them a reason to, and the power of your email list, if you have an email list that you should be building an email list, that you can email your list and tell them about this event that you’re going to have.

In addition to obviously posting on social media. That’s right. So you have a lot to do. I do. That’s a good thing.