What To Do When Business Is Slow

Okay, let's talk about what to do when business is slow. And for a lot of businesses, a lot of business owners, a lot of industries, you might have peaks and valleys right you might have busy seasons and slow seasons. And so I wanted to share some things that you can do during those slower seasons that are really going to set you up for success.

During those busy seasons, and also allow you to feel like you're still working on your business, you're still working in your business and not kind of get into freakout mode when things are slower, right. So, my first piece of advice here is use that slow period and take a break, right, a slow period is a perfect opportunity to take a vacation, take a break once last time you did that. So, if you know that you have a slow season coming up. Think about taking a break, a vacation or a staycation. Whatever it is, take a few days off, but just make sure you're getting some rest right because, especially if you are coming off of a busy season, it can be so easy to feel super burnt out but also feel like you have to keep going and keep running and keep hitting the pavement and things like that and working really hard, but sometimes, just taking a break can be the most impactful thing that you can do for your business. And, you know, if you've already taken a vacation or you have a vacation planned or you know you, you know, maybe you're just going to take a day off, whatever that feels like and feels good for you. Another thing that you can really do when business is slow is take that opportunity to really mindfully network. Both just to network with other people in your space, other business over the owners other entrepreneurs, but this can also be a really great opportunity for some cross promotion, right.

So, is there someone in your space or in a space similar to yours, and they might have a podcast that you can be a guest on, or they might have a Facebook group, you can go live in and share some value with, or you might be able to do some guest blogging, and what that does is not only is it great because it builds that network, it builds those relationships that are super powerful for a lot of small businesses, gets you talking to other people. You know, you never know what you can learn from another business owner, but cross promotion is such great. It builds such great awareness for your business, it's a really great exposure for your business so if you don't already have a cross promotion strategy and plan.

Use this opportunity, you'll look at how are you, are you networking, how are you networking, and how can you utilize your network to be mutually beneficial with other business owners, so that you guys can each do some cross promotion to each other's audiences, right and this can be so great and so impactful, but a lot of times it's something that kind of gets pushed to the side when we're really busy, so a slower time or a slower season can be an amazing opportunity to really look at how are you networking, how do you enjoy networking, and are there any opportunities for cross promotion there. Another thing to do is lead generation and follow up during this time.

Do you have any former customers previous customers previous clients that you can check back in with right and see if they need anything in any updates if they want to purchase again? I'm thinking about photographers specifically here, right, if you are in a slower season, follow back up if you did a brand strategy session with someone, maybe they need you know new brand photos taken. If you are taking photos of families, you know, maybe they haven't taken a family photo in a while and they want to have a shoot. You know, if they got married, maybe they've had kids, right really easy low hanging lead generation fruit to pick from the tree there, and then you can also use this opportunity to test all their lead generation strategies you haven't used before, or lead generation strategies you have used and found successful but you don't really have time to focus on during your busier season, and obviously doing this lead generation and follow up sets you up to have an even better, you know, busy season later, but it can also turn a slow period into a busy period.

So if your business isn't seasonality isn't seasonal instead you're kind of just, it's just a little bit slow right now and you don't really know why, follow ups and lead generation are an amazing way to really use that time to get yourself out of that slow period, right and get yourself getting those sales and getting that business and and get back to a point where you're not slow. So if you're not mindfully doing that lead generation and those follow up to wall businesses slower, make sure you're doing that because that could turn a slow time into a busy time, right, it can turn a time where you're not making as much money into a time where you're making plenty of money. Right. Another thing to do. While businesses slow is really looked at, look at your systems and processes and SLPs here. So, do you have systems and processes and templates set up around everything that you're doing in your business right do you have templates set up for anything you're doing more than once.

Do you have SAP documentation that really outlines, okay when you need to do this task, these are the exact steps that need to happen when you're doing that task right, and this is something that can really easily when you're busy, you don't have time for these things right you don't stop and set these things up, but they can serve you and be so impactful for your business when you get busy again right because when we're busy we feel like we don't have time to set up templates. We don't have time to document every single thing, single thing step of a task that we're doing right, so attached that might only take you five minutes, if you're documenting every step in that process might take you 10 minutes but if you're really busy, you're not going to stop and do that right, but having that SLP setup.

Having that template set up having that system set up around that thing is going to allow you to complete it faster. Next time, even outsource it.

So really looking at, here's all of my tasks, here's the things that I'm spending the most time doing because I know you're tracking your time with toggle for free. And here's where we have systems and processes set up, here's where we don't Okay great. Go set that up. We have SLPs for these things, but we don't have SLPs for over those things over there so we're going to go ahead and handle those. Can any of these things be templated that aren't already templated. All of those things, fantastic, and productive things to look at if business is a little bit slower for you right now. The other thing I really recommend you do is look at your numbers, your analytics, and your money during this time. And if you're not a numbers person, we put we procrastinate on this we put this off a little bit, right, because it makes us feel a little bit intimidated maybe uncomfortable but this is a really great opportunity to look at your numbers look at your metrics, because you can identify,

Okay, what's happening here is this, why isn't this higher we expected this number to be higher. Or, wow, this, we're getting so many inquiries about this thing, how can we capitalize on that. Right. Or, you know the number of leads that are coming in, how many are actually converting is that less than we would expect to convert, maybe we need to look at our sales process there and our communication and follow up process there. Looking at your numbers is going to show you all that information.

Or we're spending 30 hours a month on content creation, but we haven't had any leads or sales come in from social media in six months. Okay, so there's a disconnect there. What can we do, how can we adjust our strategy to make sure that we have actual leads coming in from social media, right, but if you're not looking at your numbers you're never going to be able to ask and pose those questions, and you're never going to be able to allow those numbers. To help you better inform your strategy and develop your strategy for your business. Same thing goes with the money, right, if you don't have an account and if you don't have a bookkeeper. Now's the time right use setup with Wave, wave is free and you connect all your finances to it and everything and it can help you track. This is how much money we have coming in, this is how much money we have going out, right, be looking at those things, you can also now tie that back to your time tracking that you've done and say, Oh wow, we really need to increase our prices for this client because they're taking a lot of our time, but they are bringing in the least amount of revenue for the business. Right. Or, Oh we're selling a lot of this thing, how can we sell more of this thing, this is a huge revenue generator for the business, how can we lean into that more. Right, visit your money, visit your metrics visit your numbers, and you're going to be able to ask and answer a lot of these questions for your business.

And then, the next step that is look at your customer journey. How are you bringing people down the purchasing funnel, how are you building the know like trust factor, how are people finding you. From there, how are you showing them value for free from there how are you getting them to purchase to build start to build trust. From there, are they or how are they, how are you getting them to purchase your higher ticket priced items. These are all questions and things that you want to look at because you might find, oh we have a mid tier price point digital product here, but it's not feeding into a larger, higher price point item. So is it worth it to for us to develop a higher price point item here, or we have this higher price point item here, but we have nothing funneling down into that that's going to help support people finding out about it, learning about it, you know, building trust getting value nothing's funneling into that. So we're not really supporting that thing, Or we're not really talking about that thing enough in our marketing, right, looking at your customer journey, where people might be dropping off oh we're getting so much traffic to the website for this thing, but then people are dropping off, it's not converting why that might tell you oh we need to make some optimizations to the website there.

But these are all questions that a lot of times when we're busy, we find that we don't have time to look at these things and consider these things because it really requires you to sit and focus on something that is in the business, right, that is not serving clients not getting out current products not marketing things, things like that. It's these higher level strategic questions that oftentimes get shoved to the side when we are busy, right when we don't have time. But asking yourself these questions looking at first of all take a break. Look at how you're networking can you network more effectively, are you doing lead generation and follow up. Look at your systems and processes and SLPs, look at your numbers, your metrics and your money, and then look at your customer journey.

All of these are fantastic opportunities to really utilize a slower period in business and I really really recommend that you try doing that, give it a shot, and let me know how it goes. I hope this is really helpful if you have any questions on on Instagram, Sam dot d Nicola, that's Sam DiNicola, and if you are like wow I don't know how to answer any of these questions for my business, a digital strategy intensive is going to be really impactful for you so that we can do a deep dive into your business together. So you can start to understand how you can drive that business strategy, as the entrepreneur as the business owner and how you can start to look at those things, recognize trends and make decisions based off of those trends. So if you're interested about learning more about a digital strategy intensive. You can learn more about it on my website samdinicoladigital.com or feel free to shoot me a DM on Instagram and I'd be happy to talk it through with you. So I hope this was helpful.

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