Most front desk problems are not people problems. They are missing-information problems. This front desk checklist for small business owners lists, in order, everything your front desk must know before the phone rings — so a caller gets a booked appointment and a clear answer instead of "I'll have to ask the owner and call you back."
Work through it once, in writing. Whether the desk is you, a part-time hire, or The Mayor covering the calls you miss, the list is the same. If an item is not written down, it does not exist on a busy Saturday.
The Front Desk Checklist for Small Business Owners, Item by Item
- 1. Your services, in the words customers use. List every service exactly as callers ask for it, with the plain name first and your shop name for it second. If customers say "fix a leak" and your book says "plumbing call-out," both phrases belong on the list, or the caller hears hesitation where they expected a yes.
- 2. Your real prices — and what to say when there is no fixed price. Write the starting price or the range you are willing to quote on the phone. For jobs you cannot price sight-unseen, write the sentence the desk should use: what the visit costs, what happens next, and when the customer gets the full figure. A desk that cannot quote anything books nothing.
- 3. Your hours, including the exceptions. Opening hours, lunch cover, holidays, and the last appointment you will take each day. Callers ask about this week, not your usual week, so the exceptions matter as much as the routine.
- 4. Your booking rules. How far ahead you book, how long each service takes, what needs a deposit, what can be squeezed in, and what never can. These rules decide whether an offered time is real. A booking taken against a rule you never wrote down becomes a double-booking you have to unwind in person.
- 5. Your calendar, kept current. The desk can only offer times that are actually open. If the book lives in your head or on a sticky note, no one covering the phone can book with confidence — they can only take messages and promise a call-back that may never happen.
- 6. What to say when you cannot answer. Every shop misses calls: when both hands are busy, when a second caller rings during a first call, when it is 8pm. Decide now what happens in that moment. With The Mayor, once your number is connected, an unanswered call gets an instant text back from your number, offering the caller a path to a booked time. The missed-call text-back walkthrough shows the exact wording a caller receives.
- 7. How a booking gets confirmed and reminded. Who sends the confirmation, how soon, and what the reminder says. Most no-shows are not rudeness; they are a booking that was never confirmed in writing. Write the confirmation step into the checklist, not into someone's memory.
- 8. What counts as urgent, and who hears about it at once. A burst pipe, a locked-out tenant, a pet that stopped eating — every trade has its version. Name yours, and name how the desk reaches you: a call, a text, or a note in the morning briefing. Urgent cannot mean "whenever someone notices."
- 9. The questions only you can answer. Some calls should never be guessed at: a complaint, a price dispute, a job outside your area. The checklist should say plainly which questions get taken as a message for you, so the desk never invents an answer to sound helpful.
- 10. The morning check. Someone — you, your opener, or your briefing — should start the day knowing who is coming in, what is still unconfirmed, and which of yesterday's callers never got a reply. The Mayor sends a morning briefing in plain words covering exactly that. It takes two minutes to read and saves the mid-morning scramble.
A Worked Example: A Two-Chair Barbershop on a Friday
Here is the checklist in use, as an example — a made-up shop, no result promised.
Friday, 11am. Both chairs are full and a third customer is waiting. The phone rings twice. The first caller wants a Saturday cut: because items 1 to 5 are written down, the desk — in this case The Mayor covering the missed call by text — can offer the real open Saturday times and book one, confirmed by text under item 7. The second caller asks about a service the shop does not offer: under item 9, that becomes a clean no with a referral suggestion, not a vague maybe. At 6pm the owner reads the day in one briefing instead of reconstructing it from memory.
Nothing in that Friday required a bigger team. It required the information to exist before the phone rang.
What This Costs When The Mayor Covers the Desk
The checklist above is free to write and yours to keep, whoever covers your phone. If The Mayor covers it, the published prices on the pricing page are these. You can start free, with no credit card to start: the free plan is $0 and includes 100 reply attempts a month — roughly 10 real conversations — and 10 microphone minutes a month. Pro is $99 a month, with 1,000 reply attempts (roughly 100 real conversations) and 120 microphone minutes. One-time top-ups of $4, $8, and $12 add attempts and minutes for that period only; they do not roll over.
Calls, texts, and your number run through your own provider account, billed directly at its own rates and never marked up on your Mayor bill. The site's worked example on Telnyx's published US rates, checked in October 2026, puts a typical month at about $4.50 billed by Telnyx. If you are weighing the desk options against each other, the companion breakdown of what a receptionist costs a small business runs the full comparison.
Who This Checklist Is For — and Who It Is Not For
It is for owner-run shops where the phone rings while the work is being done: trades, salons, clinics, repair shops, and any counter where one person is both the desk and the business. It is not a substitute for a trained receptionist in a practice where calls are long, sensitive, and handled one at a time by someone who knows every client by name — there, hire the person and use this list to train them.
Questions Owners Ask
How long does it take to work through this checklist?
About an hour, once, if your prices and hours are already clear in your own head. Most owners stall on item 2 — what they are willing to quote on the phone — and settling that one item improves every call that follows.
Do I need every item before I connect The Mayor?
No. Start with services, hours, and booking rules; The Mayor can only offer what you have given it. You can add prices, urgency rules, and confirmation wording as you go, and tighten the list whenever a caller catches a gap.
What happens when a caller asks something not on the list?
The call or message is taken for you rather than guessed at, and it surfaces in your briefing, so you can answer it yourself and add the answer to the checklist for next time.
Is the free plan enough to test this?
The free plan is $0, with no credit card to start, and includes 100 reply attempts a month — roughly 10 real conversations — plus 10 microphone minutes. That is enough to cover a week or two of missed calls for most small shops and see whether callers book from a text back.
Can a person and The Mayor share the desk?
Yes. Plenty of shops keep a person on the counter for walk-ins and let The Mayor catch the calls nobody can reach, plus evenings and weekends. The checklist is what keeps both working from the same facts.
Start With the List, Then Cover the Phone
Write the ten items down this week — on paper, in a note, wherever your desk will actually see them. Then put the cover in place: start free with The Mayor, connect your number, and let every call you cannot reach get a text back and a real time to book, instead of silence.