BFCM operations plan for a small team

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Confirm who is actually available. Not who said they might be. Names against hours.
4. 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:

1. 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.
2. Anything that needs doing gets a name and a time. No exceptions, no matter how obvious it seems in the moment.
3. 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.

Four weeks out: the decisions

Everything at this stage is a decision rather than a task, and making them now is what prevents improvisation later.

What you are actually running. Which products, what discount, which days. Vagueness here propagates into every other plan.

Stock depth on the featured products, at variant level. Anything needing a supplier order has to be resolved now, because after this point the lead time decides for you.

Who is working, on what days. Including who is not, which is the part usually discovered late.

What you will not do. The most valuable and least common item. Deciding in advance to pause a project, stop taking custom requests, or hold non-urgent supplier conversations frees capacity you will otherwise spend defending.

Two weeks out: the mechanics

Now the checkable things.

Test the full purchase path with a real card, including the discount code and any free-shipping threshold, then refund it. Codes and shipping rules interact in ways that only appear when combined.

Confirm fulfilment capacity honestly: not whether the orders can be packed in principle, but whether they can be packed by the people rostered on the days concerned, with the packaging you currently have. Running out of mailers on day two produces the same customer outcome as running out of stock.

Brief whoever answers customers on what is launching, what it costs, and what to say when something sells out. That last answer should be written before it is needed.

The week itself: who watches what

The plan for the week is not a task list, it is an assignment of attention.

Name one person watching stock, one watching customer messages, and one able to change the site or pause advertising. On a small team that is two people wearing three hats, which is fine provided it is stated rather than assumed.

Set checkpoints rather than continuous monitoring. Morning, mid-afternoon, end of day. Continuous watching produces people refreshing dashboards instead of working, and it does not catch things any earlier.

Agree the triggers in advance: at what stock level a product comes out of the email, who pauses ads, who decides. A decision made calmly two weeks earlier is better than one made at nine in the evening on the busiest day of the year.

The daily rhythm

Ten minutes each morning, five at the end of the day. Not a meeting, a checkpoint.

Morning: what sold overnight, what is now low, what is flagged, and what is different about today. End of day: what is unfinished, who owns it tomorrow, and what the first person in needs to know.

The evening handover matters most during peak, because shifts diverge and the informal channel that normally carries this disappears. A written note that takes ninety seconds prevents the most common peak failure, which is the morning shift rediscovering a problem the evening shift already knew about.

Afterwards

Thirty minutes in the first quiet week, while it is fresh. What broke, what we found out too late, and what we would decide differently.

The second question is the valuable one. Something that was true all along and reached you at four in the afternoon points at a monitoring gap rather than a preparation gap, and those are the changes that actually improve next year.

Staffing the days honestly

The plan that most often breaks is the rota, because it is built on the assumption that everybody scheduled will be present and functional for the whole shift.

Three things worth deciding in advance. Who covers if someone is ill, which during a four-day peak is not hypothetical. What gets dropped first if you are short, decided now rather than improvised at eight in the morning. And when people actually stop, because a team working sixteen-hour days by Saturday will make expensive mistakes on Sunday.

Deciding what to drop is the valuable one. A pre-agreed list of what stops when you are short, in order, means a short-staffed day is a smaller day rather than a chaotic one.

Onboarding seasonal help before the week

Anyone joining for peak should have done at least one ordinary shift before the busy days, not their first shift on the Friday.

The reason is not competence at the task, which is teachable quickly. It is that a new person on a chaotic day has no baseline for what normal looks like, so they cannot tell the difference between a problem and a busy afternoon, and they will not raise the things you most need raised.

One quiet shift beforehand also establishes whether asking questions is welcome, which is set in the first hours and is very hard to change afterwards.

What to protect when everything is busy

The predictable failure during peak is that the things preventing problems get dropped first, because they are the things nobody is waiting on.

Three are worth protecting explicitly. The morning check, because that is what catches overnight problems before they compound. The evening handover, because shifts diverge and the informal channel disappears. And flagged order review, because the cost of shipping to a bad order does not go away just because you were busy.

Everything else can degrade. Say which three are protected before the week starts, so that dropping the right things is a decision rather than an accident.

Common questions