6.1: Taking bookings

When you take bookings from new or old clients, there are several very important pieces of information which you will need to gather from them.

You will need their name and contact details so that you can get in touch if you need to; the exact nature of the event that they wish to book you for; as well as the time and the location of this event. With this information you can then assess whether or not you wish to take the job or not. Remember that just because someone has shown interest in hiring you, this doesn't mean that you have to accept the booking.

It can be an easy trap to fall into, especially at the beginning when you are just setting up your own business, feeling that you have to take every booking which is offered to you. If there is one which is too far away, is not at a convenient time or which you would not feel comfortable taking on for any reason, then it is perfectly within your rights as a self-employed balloon modeller to turn down any potential client.

6.3: Managing your bookings

Just because you are the only employee in your new company doesn't mean that you have to take all of your bookings manually by yourself.

There are plenty of online platforms which can take track of your bookings for you.



These websites will allow you to log on to your account and to track an up-to-date calendar with all of the details of your bookings clearly visible.

You can also download an app onto your phone or your table so that you can keep track of all of your bookings even when on the move. You can set them up to send you text reminders for existing bookings and e-mails about new ones. If new clients book through your website then their bookings will automatically be added to your calendar so you don't have to worry about constantly updating it.

You can also take payments and deposits online, as well as getting clients to agree to terms and conditions. This can save you a lot of time and effort in terms of paperwork and can make taking bookings a much easier and faster process. This will leave you with more spare time to focus on other parts of the business, like marketing, publicity and the balloon modelling itself.

These online services will all let you start a free trial so that you can see whether or not it works for you and your business, before you invest in any long term subscriptions.

If you are not comfortable with using technology in this way, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with managing all of your bookings using a good old paper diary. You will just have to be extremely vigilant about keeping a record of everything in one place, and will have to be extremely careful not to lose the diary! Some people find that having a fixed calendar at home or in the office, which has all the same details as the diary written on it, helps to make sure that if you do lose any important pieces of paper or information, you still have a backup of everything you need to know in a safe, accessible place.

If you ring a client, or they ring you, saving their number in your phone using the date of their booking as well as their name will help you to keep on track of who's who. It will make it much easier to find the contact numbers of clients if you need to get in touch with them for any reason and will make sure that you don't accidentally delete important numbers from your phone thinking that they are somebody else.

Protect yourself with booking contracts

To protect yourself from last minute cancellations, you should also issue a booking contract every time that someone hires you for an event. This doesn't need to be a particularly complicated document, but it should include important details such as how much notice clients need to give in order to cancel a booking; whether you take a deposit and how much that would be and whether you would consider returning that deposit under any circumstances.

If you get the client to sign this when they first make the booking, you will be protected if issues such as cancellations, postponements and changes to venue arise further along the line.