Could you use an 'extra' $17,000 a year?

Missed Appointment Opportunities can cost you $10,000 a year!

According to industry statistics, the average one-hour massage is $65. If you only lost three appointment opportunities a week (no appointments scheduled/no shows/cancellations), you would stand to lose over $10,000 a year!

Simple Facts
As an appointment-based business, your appointment availability (time) is your inventory. Your
availability or ‘future calendar' is at the mercy of the passing of time. With each second, your immediate availability (your inventory of time) is at risk of being lost forever if it is not being consumed by a paying client.

Once an unused time slot in your calendar has gone ‘unsold' you can NEVER get it back. Your opportunity to give a massage and make money during that time is lost FOREVER!

Factor in your cost to-date of your total investment (training, equipment, rent, advertising, etc) to be in the position to be able to be in business, and the cost of losing appointment opportunities is staggering.

To make the numbers even more interesting ... add in what missing two gift certificate requests per week can cost you per year. If you assume that an average gift certificate sale equals the average appointment fee, then only missing two gift certificate sales a week will cost you close to $7,000 a year (add in missed Mother’s Day, Christmas and Valentine's Day opportunities and you can easily double that!)!

How to Capture All Appointment Opportunities
If you assume that a client looking to book an appointment with you is either on your web site or
calling your phone number, they are now in a position to inquire about your availability. They want to know right now if you have availability that matches their interest.

The key business question that you need to be asking yourself then is...

What are my options to best manage my business inquiries, in order to maximize my revenue and free time?

A cost effective option is: A comprehensive online practice management ‘software’ (Software as a Service or Saas) that supports your clients ability to schedule their own appointment, purchase a gift certificate, empowers your staff (or group) to self manage their own availability, automatically alerts you and your staff of new appointments, processes credit cards, auto e-mails clients appointment confirmations and reminders (just to list a few benefits) and provides full reporting capabilities. All this ... supported by a 24/7 massage centric receptionist service.

If you are currently only using an ‘info@’ email address on your web site along with your phone number that offers the caller to leave a voice mail (if you are unavailable) … you are highly inefficient. By not responding to initial inquiries you are losing out on large amounts of revenue and wasting hours of your time returning phone calls.

Implementing a service that connects your clients to your availability and helps you easily capture all your appointment opportunities is simpler than you think. Allowing clients to get the information they need from your web site or over the phone (at the time that they make the effort to inquire), is critical to capturing the opportunities that you created in order to increase your revenue.

Summary
You cannot afford to let your appointment ‘availability inventory’ go unused and not paid for. If you cannot answer your phone when you are unavailable, you must implement an inquiry capturing process that gives your clients the opportunity to get what they want, and pay you for the privilege. Why? Because, if you don't, you are missing out on the income and freedom you deserve.

Your competition is getting smarter. It is time to sharpen your tools.