Essential tradie end-of-year checklist

A tradie’s normal is everything grinding to an expensive halt at the end of the year.

From the middle of December through to the middle of January – and sometimes beyond – sites shut down and jobs are put on hold for the annual Christmas break. That’s where a robust checklist of what needs to be done before the holidays can be helpful, helping to alleviate the big squeeze towards the end of the year and the anxiety of a lurking huge pause in income.

“It’s a strange time of year that can cause a lot of financial stress for trades because in the run-up to Christmas you’re usually really busy, so everyone is cashed up and thinking: ‘Oh wow, we killed it!’,” builder Ryan Graham, director of Graham Building Group in Melbourne, says.

“But then, about a week before Christmas Day, everything stops and you take three weeks off… then when you come back in the middle of January, it’s another five or six weeks before the money starts coming in again.”

It can be stressful, but Greg Allan, founder of The Tradies Success Academy, teaching those in the trades how to improve their business practices, says with some planning you can take the heat off. 

“The dynamic at the end of the year is really interesting actually because you’ve got this pressure from clients and the builders who want everything done before Christmas, so there’s this absolute deadline,” Greg says.

“But although everyone knows it’s coming, they’re not preparing for it [the end of the year] because they’re so busy.”

Preparation for the lead-in to the holiday season is crucial. Here’s six simple tips to help you survive the big break.

1. Get the boss off the tools and temporarily backfill

From late November to early December, instead of running yourself and your team at 100 per cent capacity for 12-hour days, consider hiring more staff. 

“What tends to happen in busy times is the business owner will go back on the tools to keep up the workload with their team. But if they’re on the tools they stop quoting, they stop invoicing, they stop answering the phones, they stop getting back to emails because they’re working,” Greg says.

“Keep the boss off the tools so they can schedule work for January and you don’t come back to an empty job list.”

2. Set realistic completion dates for jobs

You don’t want to move the goalposts on your clients suddenly – trust will be lost in an instant. But communicating with your customers (in advance) and working out which jobs could possibly wait until January could put you a step ahead.

“We all have the assumption that everyone wants stuff done before Christmas because a few people are putting on that pressure but, with a few phone calls and some communication, a lot of people don’t mind as long as they know that it’s scheduled… and that helps smooth the ‘no work’ gap,” Greg says.

3. Add dynamic pricing to your checklist

During the Christmas shutdown Ryan admits that you might start eating into your savings throughout the year as you get back on the job, return to invoicing and then chase up the payments.

“Any buffer you’ve got is funnelling out so the savings start to dwindle,” he says. “For anyone relying on the constant cycle of work to get through… it’s a real killer!”

That’s where Greg recommends small businesses look at “dynamic pricing” through the busiest period of the year, so you don’t feel the crunch as much.

“If you go to the shops and there’s a low supply of apples, the price of apples goes up,” Greg explains. “Shift your pricing with demand. That allows you to make profit and not really suffer in January and February, but it also gives you the opportunity to talk to the clients and say, ‘Hey, the price is this much at the moment, but if you wait until January it’ll be a lot less’… which fills that new year space again.”

Caption: Ensuring you’ve done a proper handover with your client, as well as having all logwork done, should be on your end-of-year checklist before Christmas shutdown.

4. Handover properly

“If it’s a completed project, submit all your certifications, get your logwork done – everything you need to do – and get that to the client,” Greg says. “If it’s an open-ended job, then it’s even more important to make sure that you’ve logged where everything is so you, your team and the client all know what’s happening.”

5. Checklist essential: invoice early

“It is 100 per cent vital that you invoice before the end of the job,” Greg says. “You should be doing progress payments as you go anyway, but you certainly want to invoice for all the work you’ve done before the break. If you can, invoice at least a week before the end of the work year, so you’re in before others [business’s invoices].”

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6. Follow up in the new year

Starting to call clients – especially the ones you managed to delay until the new year – as soon as you are back on deck should be on your checklist, Greg says. “If you have a job booked for January, notify the clients that, yes, you are still coming,” he says. “Early communication is definitely recommended so you’re off to a great start.”

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