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As some businesses augment staffs to cope with a November- December rush, others suddenly find they have little to do.

When Diane Craig launched The Label and Packaging Co., a Morton Grove-based labeling firm, 13 years ago, she didn't plan on the holidays being any different for her company.

But Craig quickly discovered that the November and December period is not the most wonderful time of the year for the labeling business.
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"Instead of our normal 10 phone calls an hour, we would get two," Craig said. "Our clients' purchasing, marketing and product development staffs were either on vacation or about to take vacations. So, decision-making was stalled."

After cleaning out her files and "looking at the phone not ringing" to kill time, Craig vowed that the holiday season in 1991 would be different.

So during Labor Day week she contacted her clients' purchasing managers, explained what happened the prior year, and asked if they would process January and February purchasing orders by Nov. 1.

They agreed because "it would help them to plan in advance," Craig said. "It also helped me to plan our production schedule so there wasn't any downtime."

As Craig discovered, holiday management is anything but business as usual for metro Chicago's 671,000 small businesses.

"It's either the busiest of times or it's the slowest of times," said John Lanigan, director of DePaul University's Coleman Entrepreneurship Center. "There doesn't seem to be any in-between."

For small businesses--primarily retailers, who may do as much as 75 percent of their annual revenue during the holidays--the challenge is managing a business with store hours that may be extended using seasonal employees and working with a deluge of phone, fax and e-mail orders that must ship immediately.

Caryn Stein, a Logan Farms Honey Glazed Hams franchisee in Arlington Heights, learned by experience last year to hire and train seasonal workers earlier.

Fifteen workers--five more than last year--started helping five full-timers with an expected 1,000 holiday orders a week on Nov. 15.

"Hopefully production will move faster when the orders start ramping up," Stein said. "Last year it was really hard trying to train and take orders on the phone at the same time."

At Lake Bluff-based Frontier Soups Inc., a 15-year-old Lake Bluff hand-assembled soup mix firm, 16 seasonal and full-time employees increase their workdays to 10 hours from 8, said owner Trisha Andersen. Workers also vary their jobs every four hours "to keep from burning out" when busy season starts in September, she said.

Frontier Soups does 75 percent of its annual $1 million sales after Labor Day.

When Warren Dobson launched Dobson Products, a South Side-based giftware and houseware manufacturer in the summer of 1991, the initial 5,000 run of "Kente Kups" he had stockpiled as holiday inventory sold out in two weeks.

Dobson manufactured an additional 15,000 to meet holiday demand "by the skin of my teeth," he said.

The following year he contracted with a Texas manufacturer for additional production, which allowed Dobson to focus on marketing and administrative issues.

Tim DeLisle, who owns Chicago-based Corigelan LLC, an 18-month-old business disaster computer records recovery firm, learned last year that the holidays "are a great time for internal projects, preparing project presentations for future business, marketing and strategic planning."

Among the work accomplished? Updating current industry numbers and graphics in Corigelan's marketing presentations, DeLisle said.

"Look at this period as an opportunity, not dead time," said Linda Darragh, associate director of the Levy Entrepreneurship Center at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "This is the time for strategic planning, evaluating your ability to execute plans and training staff. It's a great time to upgrade your systems, as well."

John Cascarano, owner of Evanston-based Cascarano Photography Studio for 30 years, prepares for the holidays in the summer by putting aside about $15,000 in cash. He uses it to pay expenses during the holidays, when business is down.

No new equipment

"I also don't buy any new equipment until after Jan. 1 so that the bills don't come until February or March, when traditionally I've got more revenue," he added.

Slow businesses should consider offering discounts or introducing new products so that there is extra time for the launches, suggests Lanigan, the DePaul University entrepreneurship center director.

Surprisingly, managing for the holidays is not usually covered in business course work, Lanigan says.

"There are so many things to address in business school that there just doesn't seem to be time," he said. "It's certainly something that we should consider for workshops or seminars. But now isn't the time, especially with businesses gearing up for what can be their busiest times."

Learning on the job

Dobson, a 1983 Atlanta University MBA graduate, said he never learned about managing during the holidays.

Instead, he learned the intricacies of working with plastic by managing the production of McDonald's Happy Meal Pumpkin pails.

"They were preparing me for a corporate life, not for being a small-business owner," he said. "But I doubt, in retrospect, that anything they'd said would have helped. You really have to go through it."

That's how Sheila Gidley, co-owner of Chicago-based Gidley Management Group, learned to order and prepare the firm's greeting cards by early November.

Her firm provides management support for local professional and charitable associations. During holiday times, volunteer members of such associations shift their attention to charitable work.

Through innovative ideas like these, small-business owners are learning to cope better with the holidays. But, in some cases, it hasn't eased all of their frustrations.

"From a biz perspective, I still dread the holidays because I'd rather be selling," Craig said about her labels. "It's horrible not to be doing that. But I think I'm dealing with [the holidays] better now that I've figured out how to handle them more effectively. They're still, though, a lump of coal in my corporate Christmas stocking."

Copyright © 2003. Chicago Tribune.