No-shows are an expense to individual service providers and small businesses.
I’d like to provide a little perspective regarding no-shows, and the impact on appointment based small businesses. I have been a service provider working for other businesses, and I’m now an owner of a business that provides jobs to other service providers. I’ve experienced no-shows from both sides of that coin.
Our business requires a deposit of 50% of your service price to book an appointment, in order to protect the business and its service providers from people that are not committed to showing up for their appointments.
When you do not show up for an appointment, you cost the business AND its service providers money. You have now taken away our ability to earn our keep, and prevented us from being able to recover that loss with another appointment who would gladly show up. In fact, it is likely that we have turned people away in order to reserve our time for you. In an appointment based industry, our time is literally our money.
We expect this to happen occasionally, but it is still an expense, money out of our pockets, every time. Did we do any hands-on work for people that don’t show? Obviously not. But let’s not forget about the cost of simply running a business. Did we want to do the hands-on work? A thousand times yes! It is why we do what we do. So we kept our doors open, showed up, spent money to get you in…and you didn’t show.
Please respect the time and money it has already cost us if you fail to show for an appointment, in spite of the 3-4 confirmation emails and text reminders you receive to help you remember.
And if you fail to show up, please understand that you agreed to our cancellation policy when you booked the appointment, and you breached that agreement by not showing. We cannot accommodate your inability to adhere to your agreement with us because we are already losing money. It is extremely stressful and irritating to deal with no-shows and their loss to us. We appreciate the grace to understand our position and your role as a customer with these kinds of businesses.
