How to handle a slow season of business (4 tips)

Transcript:

Has business slowed down a little bit? In this video let's talk about what to do during a slow season of solopreneurship. 

My name is Sagan Morrow and I'm an anti hustle Productivity Strategist and internationally board certified Success and Life Coach who specializes in working with solopreneurs. Be sure to grab my free training, Anti Hustle Secrets to Solopreneur Success! 

Now let's get into this video handling slow seasons of solopreneurship. The first thing you should know about slow seasons is that they happen to everyone. They are extremely normal and they're absolutely okay. It doesn't say anything about you as a solopreneur and your success. It just means that sometimes this thing happens, right? These things just happen sometimes. 

If you're in a slow season, there might be some feelings of panic that arise for you. You might be getting really worried and anxious about things. You also might feel just kind of lost, right? You're just like, “What do I even do with myself?” 

In that case, I want to give you four different things that you can do during a slow season of business…

The first is to get extremely well acquainted with your finances. 

This is going to be very helpful for putting you at ease if you're getting a little bit anxious or nervous about your financial situation. It's also going to help you for planning ahead. Now, often if you have been neglecting looking at your finances because you're a little bit worried about them, you might find that your business finances are much better standing than you might have expected. And when you sort of look ahead at your projections for your business expenses and that kind of thing, you might be able to sort of navigate that and be able to look at “Okay, I actually don't need to make as many sales as I initially expected… If a sale doesn't come in tomorrow, it's not the end of the world.” 

When you really take a step back and assess your finances from that sort of angle, you'll be able to plan accordingly and also again put yourself at ease. So that's the first thing. 

The second thing is to get really honest with yourself. 

Are you focusing on what matters? This is where you're kind of looking at, “Why did this slow season come about, what led to this slow season?”

The more that you can understand how it happened, especially if you've had very busy seasons in the past, the more that you'll be able to then resolve the matter. What often happens for a lot of solopreneurs is that they get caught in this sort of cycle, this feast and famine type of thing, where they have tons and tons of work, so they don't do any marketing… And then, because they didn't do any marketing, when the work ends suddenly they don't have any more work to do. This happens very often. 

This is extremely common, and that's a really good indicator that restructuring your business will be very, very helpful. 

Restructuring how you approach different things, reworking your systems and processes and strategies so that you are not caught in this constant up and down cycle — it can feel a little bit thrilling for a while to be on that kind of roller coaster, but it is not very sustainable and it kind of loses the novelty after a while when you've been on that roller coaster for a really long time. Right? You're like, “you know what, I've been here done that I'm kind of tired of this. I know what's coming.” 

And so we really want to get out of that kind of cycle and ensure that you have much stronger, longer lasting, more sustainable foundations to keep you moving forward. 

That brings us to the third, the third thing that you can do during the slow season, which is to work behind the scenes on your business.

This is where you're streamlining things, reworking your business foundations; all that kind of thing so that you can be very well prepared for an influx of work and also for the slower seasons.

Here, you're taking a total step back, you're looking at your entire business structure, all of your business assets, your foundations, systems, processes, strategies that you're using, and streamlining things, simplifying things, reworking things behind the scenes. 

The fourth thing that I would recommend doing is to focus primarily on growth tactics, marketing and sales strategies.

If you don't have work to do at the moment, if you don't have client work, then you can use that time that you would normally be doing client work or working with customers, and instead use that time for marketing purposes.

And if you do find that you're caught in this cycle of feast and famine a lot of the time, and you do get kind of nervous about “what am I going to do with myself during a slow season,” just know that you can adapt your schedule accordingly. You probably will naturally do less marketing and sales when you have a lot of work coming in. And you will just do more of that during the slower season. It's okay to have a bit of a balance like that and kind of like teeter totter it — you just don't want it to be too extreme. That's what we want to kind of avoid doing. 

So there you have it! Those are my recommendations if you're in a slow season of business right now, another thing that would be great to do is to join my Productivity Powerhouse e-course: it is specifically designed for solopreneurs to completely change how you approach your business so that you don't get caught in this super busy and then super slow season… so you can have a lot more of that longevity and sustainability and predictability built into your business with really great time management and energy management and work life balance and all of those good things designed and built into it. 

And I will also say that Productivity Powerhouse is essentially the DIY version of my six-month one-on-one coaching program, Solopreneur CEO. So if you want to work with me directly, I can actually help you with all of these things, and now would be a great time! 

If you are in a slower season, then we can rework all of your business structures right now. This would be perfect for doing that.