The week between Christmas and New Year has a particular talent for exposing weak contact lists. The office is half-empty, the person who usually handles the boiler is away, and the supplier's switchboard cheerfully explains that the team returns on the 6th. None of this is a crisis, until something breaks.

Holiday closures are predictable. Your contact list should be too. An afternoon of preparation in early December saves hours of fruitless calling later, and it costs nothing but attention.

Start With a Short List of What Actually Matters

Before you chase anyone, decide who you would genuinely need if something went wrong on a public holiday. Not every supplier belongs on that list. For most households and small businesses the essentials cluster into a few groups: heat and power, water and drainage, refrigeration, access and security, phones and IT, and anything with a deadline attached.

A workable list has eight to twelve entries. Long enough to cover the real risks, short enough that somebody will actually check it. Be honest about the difference between urgent and merely annoying. A broken card machine on the 27th is inconvenient. A failed fridge in a café with stock inside is a loss. A blocked drain in a care home is a hazard. Rank your entries, because when you are standing in a cold hallway at eight in the morning you will not want to be making judgement calls about priority.

Verify Opening Hours the Way That Suits the Business

Published hours are a starting point, not a fact. Website banners get updated late, and directory listings can lag behind reality by weeks. The bigger risk is the middle ground: businesses that are technically open but running on a skeleton crew, with reception answering calls and nobody available to authorise an engineer.

For a plumber or an electrician, a phone call is the only reliable check. You want to hear a person say the words. For a supplier you deal with regularly, email is better, because you keep a written record you can forward to a colleague at seven in the morning. Whatever the channel, ask about specific dates rather than the season in general.

Ask about the days nobody mentions

Most closures fall into a pattern: a shutdown around the main holiday, a few days of reduced staffing, then a slow return. The 29th to the 31st is often the thinnest stretch, when a business looks open on paper and is effectively empty. Ask directly which days reception is staffed, which days engineers or drivers are on call, and when the full team is back at full capacity. Three dates, clearly stated, are worth more than a paragraph of festive goodwill.

Always Ask for a Second Name

One contact is not a contact, it is a single point of failure. Whenever you confirm details with a supplier, ask who covers for the person you usually deal with. On-call rotas frequently include a name you have never heard of, and that is exactly the name you will need.

Write down both: the primary contact and the backup, each with a direct number and an email address. Note what each of them is allowed to do. An assistant who can log a job but cannot approve a callout charge is useful, but you should know that before you call. If the person you speak to hesitates, ask for the name of whoever is holding the phone in their absence. It is a perfectly normal question and almost always answered.

The real test of a contact list is not how it looks in July. It is whether it works on the 28th of December.

Five Questions Worth Asking on the Call

Keep these short. You are not conducting an interview; you are closing gaps that will otherwise open at the worst moment.

  • Which dates are you fully closed, and which are you open with a reduced team? Get dates, not descriptions.
  • If I phone on that date, who answers, and what can they authorise? A name and a limit.
  • What is the fastest route for an urgent problem over the holidays? Phone, email, a portal, or a message to a mobile.
  • Should I expect an out-of-hours charge? Worth knowing before a small job becomes an expensive one.
  • Who do I contact if your own team cannot respond? Every good firm has an answer to this.

Two minutes on the phone with each of your essential suppliers will tell you more than an hour of reading websites.

Put the List Somewhere People Can Actually Find It

A contact sheet buried in someone's inbox is not a contact sheet. Keep one master copy on a shared drive, and put a printed version somewhere obvious: the kitchen wall, the plant room, the front desk, the inside of a cupboard that gets opened weekly. If your premises have a building manager or a caretaker, they should have a copy too, and so should whoever holds the keys.

Include more than names and numbers. Add account or reference numbers, the address of the site each contact relates to, and an escalation order so nobody has to invent one under pressure. Put a review date at the top and change it every year. If your own business closes over the holidays, say clearly on your voicemail and out-of-office who is covering and how to reach them, and tell your regular customers before the break rather than during it.

Watch for the Gaps That Fail Quietly

Breakdowns announce themselves. The quieter failures do not. Deliveries that were never scheduled for the holiday week, alarm checks that lapsed, cleaning that was cancelled and not rebooked, waste collections that shifted by a day, subscriptions and domain renewals that fall due while the accounts inbox goes unread. None of these produce a dramatic bang; they produce an awkward conversation in January.

Run through your calendar and your standing orders before the closures begin. Check contract renewal dates and insurance cover, including what happens if a leak occurs while the building is empty. Where the wording is unclear or a claim is likely, read the policy carefully or speak to a broker or adviser rather than guessing. That is not a task to leave to the first morning back.

A Simple Routine for the Second Week of December

None of this takes long if you do it in one sitting, and it is far easier than improvising in the dark.

  1. Send a short confirmation email to every essential contact, with your questions as a numbered list.
  2. Phone the three or four that matter most and note what you are told, with the date.
  3. Test every number on the sheet. Mark the ones that ring out or have changed.
  4. Add backup names and direct mobiles, then print two copies and place them.
  5. Brief whoever is on duty during the break, by name, and hand them the sheet.
  6. Set your own out-of-office and voicemail to name that person and their number.
  7. Agree a short check-in call for the first working day in January.

Do that, and the strange quiet week stops being a risk. You will know who is open, who is covering, and who to call when the heating makes an odd noise on a Sunday. The rest of the holiday can be spent on things that deserve your attention more.

Photo: Mathias Reding / Pexels