How to Make the Most of a Slow Season in Business

And to be quite honest, I was not planning on recording an episode today.

I'm in this really interesting season of my business where things are a little slow.

And as I record this, it is the end of July.

This episode will come out kind of mid-August, I think.

And if you're listening to this episode and you're sitting in a slow season, whether it's the slowness of summer or the holiday season, or maybe your business is in some sort of different cycle where the slow periods appear randomly, someone told me that was that conversation I had today? Or at some point, someone in the last 24 hours told me that like April is like the Sahara Desert for their business.

And so I felt like as a way for me to process the slowness that I'm currently sitting in, I figured I'd just jump on and share some ideas or things that i do to really take advantage of the slow periods because you know as much as the internet culture does not want you to believe that slow seasons are a thing they really are okay i've been running my business long enough to know that there are periods in every single year seasons When people's buying behavior shifts, one of those periods is definitely summer.

And I mean, before I became an entrepreneur, one of my jobs was in commercial real estate.

I did real estate marketing for shopping centers specifically.

So I was pretty tuned in to shopping trends, buyer behaviors, especially seasonality.

And from a shopping perspective, summers were also a slow time.

So if you're a service provider, if you're an online coach, if you're some sort of other business owner and you're like, hey, the summer is kind of killing me.

I want this to make you feel like you're not alone, but I also want to share some ways that you can actually move through it a bit more easily.

Because if there's one thing I know for sure, slow seasons are temporary.

The fact that I can count my Zoom calls on one hand this week is both both a blessing and a curse a blessing because i hate zoom calls okay it's a blessing because of all the activity tracking cortisol tracking that i've tracked through my ultra human ring i have found that the moments that my stress levels are the highest are when i'm inevitably on zoom So my Zoom calls are on all-time low, and that's great.

The curse of that is typically in previous iterations of my business, Zoom calls have been a sign of busyness, of a full client roster, of people inquiring about my business.

And I do think that there are some things about my business that have just shifted generally over the last couple of months, but definitely since last summer.

But I know that there is going to be a part of me, regardless of the fact that I've taken my one-on-one client roster all the way down.

I'm really trying to be intentional about how I spend my time.

I actually had to do something that didn't feel super great, but I'm someone who at one point was in a lot of online communities and paying a pretty hefty subscription price tag, like the subscription line item on my money tracking document every single month.

$1,200, $1,300, $1,500 a month on subscriptions.

I have had to kind of go back in there and audit that.

Okay.

And I realized I was spending all this money on like virtual communities that I wasn't even participating in.

And this is not to knock virtual communities.

I think, you know, if you're going to join one or two really intentionally and show up for the calls and really make a point of being in those spaces, I think that is really, really beneficial.