The five questions to ask yourself before your next market Saturday

Running a weekly market is a logistics problem disguised as a community event. Most of the time the logistics part runs on instinct, a spreadsheet, and a manager who hasn't slept past 5am in six months. Here's a short checklist you can run every Friday, or every Thursday if you're really organized, to catch the five things that most often go wrong on Saturday morning.

1. Who is actually coming on Saturday?

Not who is approved. Not who came last week. Not who was on the roster as of Tuesday. Who has confirmed, in some recorded way, that they will be at your market this specific Saturday. If the answer is "I think everybody who was here last week," you're running on optimism. That's fine until the week two vendors no-show and their booths sit empty for three hours.

What to do: require an attendance confirmation from every vendor on the roster. A text reply, a portal check-in, a form submission, whatever works in your workflow. The point is to have a list on paper (or on screen) of humans who said "yes, I'll be there."

2. Who has paid?

Every vendor attending this Saturday should have a clear payment status: paid, pending, or behind. If your answer to this question involves opening Venmo, your bank account, and a spreadsheet at the same time, the answer is "I don't know yet."

What to do: pick one place to track payments and use it for every vendor. Mixing cash, Venmo, checks, and three different invoicing tools is how late payments hide.

3. Where is everyone going to set up?

The booth map for this Saturday should exist. Not in your head. Not in a thread of sticky notes. On paper or on a screen, with every confirmed vendor slotted into a specific booth. If two vendors can end up in the same booth or one vendor can fail to find their booth, the map isn't done.

What to do: finalize the map before Friday evening. Leave two empty slots for last-minute additions and emergencies. Share the map with anyone else who'll be on-site helping. Never assume the knowledge lives only in the manager's head.

4. Whose paperwork is about to expire?

Insurance certificates, cottage food permits, health licenses, resale permits. Every one of these has an expiration date, and every one of them creates a problem the week after it lapses. Any vendor on your roster whose paperwork expires within the next 30 days should get a nudge this week.

What to do: sort your vendor list by document expiration date at least once a week. Send a polite reminder to anyone within the 30-day window. It is much easier to prevent a lapse than to explain one to a board or an insurance company.

5. What changes do your vendors need to know about by Friday night?

Parking changes, load-in time adjustments, weather, layout changes, special guests, health inspector visits, a new rule about pets. Anything your vendors need to know on Saturday should be communicated by Friday night, in one message, through whatever channel actually reaches them.

What to do: send one "this Saturday's bulletin" message every Friday. Make it a habit. Over time your vendors will start watching for it, which means fewer of them calling you at 6am.

The version that runs itself

If you run this checklist manually every Friday, you'll catch most of what goes wrong on Saturday. If you run it through software designed for weekly markets, so the attendance list, the payment status, the booth map, the expiring documents, and the bulletin message all exist in one place and update themselves, you'll catch all of it, and you'll get your Friday nights back.