The failure is never traffic
Small stores rarely fall over on BFCM because of load. They fall over because four people are making decisions simultaneously with no way to see what the others just decided, and because the one person who knows how something works is asleep.
Everything below targets those two problems. None of it requires more headcount.
September: decisions, not preparation
Make the decisions now, while nobody is under pressure. Written down, in one place your team can open on the day.
- Your stock floor per product, and who may breach it. One number, one name. Without this you will discover on Friday morning that two people have both promised the last twelve units.
- Discount ceiling and who can approve an exception. Support will be asked. Decide the answer before they are.
- The oversell rule. If you oversell, what happens: cancel, backorder, or substitute? Write the customer message now, calmly.
- What you will not do. The list of things you are consciously dropping for the weekend. This is the most useful item and the one always skipped.
October: rehearse the boring parts
- Run one full order through every exception path. Refund, partial refund, address change, cancel after fulfilment. Find out now which one nobody knows how to do.
- Check every alert threshold against expected volume. Thresholds tuned for normal weeks will either fire constantly or not at all. See getting the threshold right.
- Confirm who is actually available. Not who said they might be. Names against hours.
- Write the handover note template so nobody has to invent it at 6pm on Friday.
November: the week before
- One room for the weekend. Everything operational goes there and nowhere else.
- Pin the decisions from September in that room. Not in a doc nobody opens.
- Give every shift a named lead. Not a manager necessarily, just the person who decides when opinions differ.
- Agree the escalation path: who gets woken up, for what, and by what method.
The point of preparation is not to predict what goes wrong. It is to reduce the number of decisions you have to make while tired.
The weekend itself
Three rules that hold under pressure:
- Every decision goes in the room. Not in a DM, not verbally across the bench. If it is not written down, the next shift does not know it.
- Anything that needs doing gets a name and a time. No exceptions, no matter how obvious it seems in the moment.
- Handover is written, not spoken. Five lines: what changed, what is outstanding, what to watch, who is on next, what I would do first.
The Tuesday after
Do the retro while it is still raw and specific. The useful question is not “how did we do” but “what did we have to decide twice?” Every repeated decision is a rule you were missing, and writing it down is next year's September work already done.