OCTOBER

MARKETING Start planning your holiday email blasts now. Offer gift ideas and feature exclusive deals to make your clients feel special. Top five days and times to send emails: end of October, Thanksgiving evening, Black Friday mid-morning, Cyber Monday afternoon, one week before Christmas.

SEO It takes 30-45 days for website changes to register with major search engines, so if your store’s lagging on page 3 or 4 of Google, you’ve got work to do. Now is also the time to start adjusting site content for the holiday season. Put “Christmas” and “Holidays” into your titles and keywords, and start putting that into people’s heads.

STAFF Finalize work schedules for the next 12 weeks (include the first half of January). Check your staff’s obligations and work around any clashes. Identify the peak hours and ensure your best budtenders will be on the floor. Temporary staff members should be trained and in place by the beginning of November.

NOVEMBER

MARKETING If you normally wait until around Thanksgiving before holding holiday season events at your store, you may want to try going a little earlier this year. Not only do you avoid clashes with your staff and customers’ work parties and family gatherings, but you get an early indicator of what will be popular for the holidays and still have a chance to place reorders.

INVENTORY Get your budtenders busy making up last-minute stocking stuffers. Get creative and varied with a mix of bundled items ranging from dogwalkers to terp pearls.

SALES FLOOR Walk through your store in the first week of November as if it were the first time. What do you notice first? Are you being pulled in certain directions? How is the POS experience in terms of lighting and product visibility? Fix anything that could hurt the in-store experience.