In the time that I’ve been in distribution, it’s been a mental adjustment for me to get used to the fact that, on my side of the business at least, December is a low-key month.

Indeed, in direct contrast to all the previous years, I don’t have to work very hard in December. I don’t schedule store visits or meetings with buyers because they don’t have time to see me. Indeed, I count it as a good thing that they don’t have time to see me.

November is a busier month for me than December, because that’s when all the final decisions on pipeline fills for the Christmas season are made. By December it’s only replenishment orders, and those are mostly automated.

In fact, on the mobile side of my business, I’ve joked that every year September/October, with the hype and hysteria surrounding the annual iPhone launch, is my December. Things are a lot more frantic then than during Christmas itself.

Given how important this time of year is to most businesses, regardless of whether you’re in retail, AV integration or both, it’s important now to pay attention to the little details that will improve your business over the holiday season.

The first suggestion: Think proactively. This week I experienced a shock when I reached out to many of my dealers expressly to discuss their projected inventory levels for December, with an eye towards some last minute fine-tuning.

A surprising majority responded with “Uh oh, I haven’t even thought about that yet! What have you got?”

I say that, not to shame anybody, but to be thankful that I chose to be proactive. Even if they weren’t prepared I was, and collectively we’re able to better prepare their inventory levels for the next six critical weeks of sales.

On the AV side, I always made a point to call up clients at this time of year to extend holiday greetings to them. Aside from being congenial, there were two main reasons for it. The first was to gently drum up new business. “Oh, I’m glad you called,” I’d often hear, “My brother in law is thinking about a cinema room and projector.” Chance favors the prepared, as they say.

The other reason was even more important: proactive service. Typically clients won’t call you over minor system glitches, even if they’re annoying, until things reach a tipping point. Before the season where people entertain family and friends in their home begins, now is a perfect time to reach out and hear from them: “Since you called, you should know that sometimes I have to hit the button three times before it switches from PVR to XBox ONE.”

Find out about those service calls now, and make time for your techs to fix them in the course of your regular workdays so that you don’t get a panicked call on a Saturday night in mid-December.

For the service calls you didn’t manage to head off early, be prepared, and make arrangements for on-call emergency services over the holiday break. For when your office is closed, maintain an emergency number, and leave that number on your office voice mail message. One dealer in Vancouver I know maintains not one, but two emergency pager numbers, a main and a backup, and the numbers are the first option callers hear on the company’s voice message during off hours, not just during holidays.

In their case, they see the hotline as a management tool. The hotline is a barometer of their abilities, and the general manager knows that if they’re getting after hours calls, that indicates issues that need to be addressed, whether it’s their work, or the equipment they’re using.

Thankfully, according to AV pros, fewer emergency service calls are necessary than in years past, due to remote monitoring and networked automation hardware. In the event of a service issue the tech who’s on call is able to log on to the client’s system, diagnose the fault and most of the time fix it remotely.

Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Prepare your company for the holiday season, and that will help keep your business merry and bright.