Straight in, or ask first?

A booking lands at twenty to ten on a Tuesday night. A name you don't recognise, a cockapoo called Miso, full groom, Saturday at eleven. You're in bed with your phone, three lines of text and a thumb over the accept button.

Regulars book straight in, new dogs come as requests. It's the obvious place to draw it, and it's a good instinct. It also sorts your diary by how long you've known someone, and that isn't quite what goes wrong.

Two separate things go wrong with a booking you didn't take yourself. The slot is wrong: too short, wrong service, a coat that needs another hour nobody paid for. Or the slot is empty, and they never turn up. Both feel like "I don't know this person", so they get the same fix. They don't have the same fix.

Approving a booking doesn't make anyone turn up

Accepting a stranger's request hands you nothing you didn't already have. You're reading the same answers they typed into the same form. Nothing about the tap makes the dog easier, and nothing about it makes the owner more likely to arrive.

What a request is actually worth is the right to change the booking before it's real. Take Miso at eight instead of eleven. Put ninety minutes on it instead of sixty. Ring them, because "hasn't been done since Christmas" is doing a lot of work in that form. If your answer is always yes and you never move anything, you haven't built a gate. You've built a delay, and the customer is the one waiting in it.

The empty-slot risk is a different job. Nobody ever showed up because you approved them. That one gets answered with money. A deposit, or a card held against the booking, works the same whether you looked at the booking or not.

Can you size the job before the dog arrives?

That's the test the line should sit on. Not how many times you've seen them. Whether what you've got in front of you is enough to book the right amount of time at the right price.

For a dog you groom every six weeks, it is. You know the coat, you know what he's like on the table, you know he's a ninety-minute dog with a second bath in summer. There's nothing there for you to approve. Making that owner wait overnight for a slot you were always going to give them is a cost with nothing on the other side of it.

For a dog you've never had, the same booking is a guess. The owner picked the service off a list, using words that mean something different in every shop. "Full groom" got chosen because it was the dearest one and they wanted to do right by the dog. That's the booking worth holding. The person isn't the problem. You just can't say yet how long it takes.

A regular stops being a regular at some point

The part the usual split misses is that a client you know can hand you a dog you don't. The cavoodle who was easy at six weeks comes back at eight months, pelted behind the ears and down the legs, booked into the same tidy-up he's always had because that's what the diary remembered. You know the owner. You don't know that coat any more.

So the useful version of "regular" isn't on the client record, it's in the gap. Inside their normal interval, they book straight in. Well past it, and it's a first-time booking again, with the questions that come with one. Pick your own multiple; twice the interval is a fair place to start. It's easier to say to an owner than it sounds, too. Eight months is long enough that they've seen the knots as well.

The line can sit on the service, or on the day

Some work can't really be wrong. A nail trim, a bath and tidy, a puppy's first visit. Short, predictable, and if the dog turns out to be more than the booking said, it costs you ten minutes rather than your afternoon. There's no reason a stranger can't book those straight in, and they're a cheap way to meet a dog before it's in the diary for the full thing.

Other work is a judgement before it's a price. A de-matt, a hand-strip, a double coat in November. Those are worth seeing first even from a client of four years. What you're approving there is the estimate.

A wrong booking on a Tuesday is a slow afternoon. The same booking at eleven on Saturday costs you the two behind it as well. Holding your busiest day for requests while the rest of the week stays open is a defensible line, and plenty of shops draw it exactly there.

It has a real price. Saturday is the day you have least time to sit and answer anything, so the queue you built to protect it is the one you're slowest to clear. If you're drawing the line on a day, decide who clears it and when. Otherwise the protection turns back into a delay.

Where to put the line

• Straight in. Dogs you groom on a known interval, while they're inside it. Short, predictable services. Anything where being wrong costs ten minutes.
• As a request. Dogs you've never had. Clients well past their usual gap. De-matts, strips and heavy coats, whoever's asking. The hours you can least afford to fill badly.
• Not a request at all. The people you're worried won't show. Take a deposit and let them book.
• Never. A queue nobody has agreed to clear. An unanswered request is worse than no online booking, because they think they've booked.

The line moves, and it's meant to. Most of what starts as a request should have stopped being one by the third visit. If it hasn't, you're approving bookings you already know the answer to.

Keep reading

• Who gets to put a dog in your diary? — the three ways to run the diary, and why the middle one exists.
• Why the best groomers take deposits — the other half of this: the risk approval can't touch.
• Appointment settings — where approval, notice periods and booking windows are set.
• Seglo for pet grooming.