Kids are back in school, parents are back at work full time, and you’re wondering how that impacts your business. If your business or works with families or gets a lot of their business from them, you’re likely seeing an increase in business. But if your business is more seasonal (i.e. vacation rentals, holiday related) you’re probably seeing fewer new bookings, appointments, or service requests.Which begs the question: How do you keep a steady stream of customers even when the season or time of year might normally keep you down?
Let’s focus on three ways you can use downtime to increase your profitability or even implement strategies that could keep you from having downtime all together!
Diversify
One of the best ways to keep your business from being dependent on seasonality or certain types of customers is to diversify what you offer or who you offer it to. Say you run a landscaping company that does a lot of outdoor construction projects and landscaping maintenance. Your business might benefit from offering Christmas lights when the weather is colder, people aren’t spending as much time outside, and new plants might die if you were to plant them during the winter. Or you might consider offering your services in a different part of town or offering specials to young families looking to save on their landscaping maintenance if they bundle services with you.
Or maybe you have just decided to start a restaurant or maybe already own a local restaurant that sees most of your business on the weekends. You could consider having specialty nights for different groups throughout the week (Ladies Night, Taco Tuesday, Monday Night Football watch parties, etc.). Or you could start a food truck that goes to different parts of the city showcasing the kind of food your restaurant offers to attract people from different communities when they have more time to travel to your location on the weekends.
While having a specialty and a niche can be very beneficial for your business, you want to avoid being so dependent on a particular group of people or type of client that you run the risk of having financial issues if for one reason or another that group drops off.
Implement
The second thing you want to do during downtime or when considering seasonality is implement systems to avoid downtime for your business. Here are a couple things you can implement for your business that can help you slower periods.
Purchase & Implement a CRM
Whether it’s Hubspot, Salesforce, or an industry specific CRM, having a central place you can store all your customer data and use it to make decisions can be a lifesaver for your business. While most business owners are only thinking about how they can get new business when business is down, taking the time to proactively develop the routines and processes required to effectively manage your prospects and customers in a CRM can be the difference between business success and failure.
While some of the work required to maintain your CRM and keep information up to date has to be a manual process, a lot of CRM work is as simple as instructing your staff to make updates to contacts.
You can set rules to email contacts that haven’t been contacted in the last 6 months, remind staff to contact high intent prospects that you haven’t heard back from, and plan text and email blasts to groups of contacts that could benefit from additional products and services.
Update Your Databases
Sometimes your business opportunities are waiting in the spreadsheets you aren’t looking at. Make sure that you’re collecting all of your contacts, prospects, and referral sources into your CRM or whatever system you use to make decisions for your business.
Make sure that your Point of Sale systems are talking to your CRM, or at least that your staff are manually adding contacts into your other systems so you can also understand what types of customers are giving you the most profitability and which products or services are your biggest hits. Tracking revenue in this way will help you spend time and attention on the areas that are benefiting your business the most.
Automate Review Collection
Reviews are the lifeblood of your business. What your past customers have to say about you is the deciding factor between whether or not people that don’t know your business yet want to do business with you.
When a customer checks out or finishes doing business with you, send them a text or an email with the link to your Google My Business profile to give you a 5 star rating. You may even consider giving them a QR code to scan if they’re checking out at a cash register to make it as easy for them as possible to give you a good review.
Keep Moving Forward
Enough about systems…one of the toughest things to do in business is to work through seasonality, keep a positive attitude, and show up to work giving your best even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t underestimate the power of talking a walk, grabbing a coffee with a good friend, or taking a day to do some team bonding.
Everyone wants to show up when things are going great in their business, but how you act and lead when everything doesn’t go the way you want it to can be the difference between having a successful business or not.
With back to school comes lots of positives, but it also comes with some potential hardships for businesses. Keep your mindset on helping your customers, equipping your employees, and spending personal time with family and friends so you remember why you’re doing all this in the first place. Sometimes your toughest critic and biggest hurdle to overcome is your own mindset. Your focus determines your reality, and sometimes all you need to do is focus on the positive to completely change your approach to running your business.
We covered a lot of bases in this one, but hopefully with the start of another school year and going in to the fall it acts as a reminder to focus on the things you can control as an entrepreneur and attack these opportunities proactively to catapult your business to the next level.
If you want to read more helpful tips about starting, maintaining, or running your business check out our extensive blog articles here!