Slow season in a local business and what to do

What it costs 6 min read

A quiet month is a season, a market, or something broken, and the three need different answers. How to tell which one you have before you panic.

It is the third week and the phone has gone strange. Not silent, just thin.

Every owner has the same two thoughts in the same order. This is normal for the time of year. And then, at about eleven at night, the other one: something is broken and nobody has told me.

First rule out the quiet that is not real

Before you conclude anything about the market, check that people can still reach you. This takes fifteen minutes and it is the only part of a slow month that is urgent.

Load your website on your phone, on mobile data rather than the wifi, and make sure it opens without a warning screen in front of it. Send yourself a message through your own inquiry form and wait for it to arrive, including in the junk folder. Call your business number from a phone that is not yours and let it go through to voicemail, so you hear what a stranger hears. Search your business name and check the number on the listing is the one you are holding.

A form that quietly stopped delivering looks exactly like a quiet two weeks. So does a listing with an old number on it. Rule that out first, because it is the one version of a slow month you can fix this afternoon.

Then work out if it is a season or a surprise

Look at the same month last year. If you have invoices, you have the answer already, and it takes half an hour to find.

Most trades have a shape. Roofing goes quiet when the weather is good and frantic when it is not. Cleaning drops in the holidays. Servicing clusters before the season the equipment gets used. If this month was thin last year and the year before, you are not in trouble, you are in January.

If you cannot check because the records are not there, start the record now. Write the month and the number of jobs on a page. In two years that page will end this argument for you every time it starts.

Know what the quiet month bill actually is

Slow months hurt later than they happen, which is why they surprise people.

The work you did last month is what pays this month's bills. The work you are not doing this month is what will not pay next month's. So the gap arrives when the phone has already picked up again and everything feels fine.

Two dull things help. Know what one month of your fixed costs comes to, written down, so the number is not a guess at midnight. And get invoices out the day the job finishes rather than at the end of the month, because in a thin month the money already owed to you is the fastest money there is.

Work the list you already have

The cheapest work available in a quiet month is sitting in your own records. People you have already done a job for, whose next one is due or nearly due.

This is the month to go through it properly, because in a busy month you never will. Pull out anyone on an interval that is up. Pull out anyone you quoted in the last year who never came back to you, and ask once whether they still want it done. Pull out the jobs where you noticed something and did not fix it because you were not there for that.

The whole thing is thirty short messages about specific work at specific addresses, sent by the person who did the original job.

The jobs that only fit in a quiet month

Everything on this list is something you have been meaning to do for a year and cannot do in February.

• Photograph three or four finished jobs properly, in daylight, before and after
• Write down what you actually charge for the five things you do most
• Fix the quote template so it stops taking you forty minutes a quote
• Get the receipts and the paperwork to whoever does your tax
• Service your own gear and the van, at a time when losing it for a day costs nothing
• Write the page on your website you have never written, usually the one about the thing you most want to do more of
• Take the two days off you did not take when it was busy

Do not discount your way out of it

The obvious move in a thin week is to drop the price to fill the schedule.

A discount to fill a quiet month brings you the customers who choose on price, and they are the ones least likely to be there next year. It teaches anybody who notices to wait for the quiet season. And it makes the number you charge in busy months harder to defend, because you have shown it can move.

Filling time is still a good instinct. Fill it with something that does not touch your prices: work you offer to existing customers, a job you had put off, or one of the things on the list above.

The quiet is when you fix what costs you the busy months

Whatever went wrong in your last busy stretch is still there, waiting, and it is invisible while everything is working.

The missed calls that never got returned. The quotes that took a week to go out. The jobs you took that you should have turned down, because the schedule was full and you said yes anyway.

Pick one and fix it now while the pressure is off. A fix made in a quiet month is worth more than the same fix attempted in the middle of a busy one, which is to say attempted and abandoned.

When quiet is telling you something harder

If it is quiet in the months that used to be busy, if it has been quiet for three seasons running, or if the phone is ringing but nobody is booking, it is not a season. That is a different problem, and it is worth naming rather than waiting out.

It might be pricing. It might be an area with fewer of your kind of job in it than there used to be. It might be that a large competitor moved in. And sometimes it is a business that has run its course, which is a thing that happens to good tradespeople who did nothing wrong.

No website fixes a business without demand underneath it. If the quiet is structural, spending money on marketing is the most expensive way to find that out, and anybody who sells you one without asking about the last three years is not doing you a service.

Questions people ask

How do I know if it is the season or my marketing?

Compare the same month last year, and check that your form, phone and listing all work. If last year was the same and everything is reachable, it is the season.

Should I take a cheap job to keep the schedule full?

Sometimes, if the alternative is an empty week and the job covers your costs. Do it as a one off, quietly, and do not publish a lower price.

Is it worth advertising during the quiet season?

It depends whether the quiet is people not needing you or people not finding you. Advertising fixes the second and does nothing for the first.

How much should I have set aside for the quiet months?

That is a question for whoever does your books, and the answer depends on your fixed costs rather than on any rule of thumb. The useful first step is writing down what one month costs you to exist.

Should I put my prices up to make up for a slow season?

Not to cover the quiet. Raise your prices when your costs or your work justify it, and do that on its own timing, not in a panic in the third quiet week.