Is yours a seasonal business – maybe a landscaping business, a vacation cabin rental or a gift shop? If it is, you can easily understand the pressing demands the arrival of the season can impose on you and your staff members.
The rush of activities often makes it difficult to manage everything on time.
Add to it the necessity to stock up the inventory, the requirement to recruit more helping hands, the responsibility of managing additional cash flow and you have the perfect recipe for a disaster waiting to happen.
The situation worsens if you haven’t prepared for the season well in advance.
Whether your business is at its peak in summer, such as a rental business of vacation cabins up in the mountains, or in winter, such as a gift shop that stock up holiday-related items, you need to make sure you are ready for the arrival of the season.
How do you do it? Here are the three tenets you need to follow to attain this objective.
Tenet 1: Manage Your Cash Flow Diligently
Before you take up the money management task, you need to understand that the business does well at a certain time of the year. It’s essential that you chalk out a plan to make the cash work for the entire year.
Without an income and expenditure plan, it’s more than likely that you will spend most of the profits when the cash flow is generous. But this isn’t right. Your business will have to bear the brunt of your indiscretion in the thin months.
You also need to have enough cash to stock up the inventory and recruit more people for the peak season. And if you haven’t managed your money well, you may find it difficult to pull it together at this critical point.
On the other hand, if you distribute the income and expenditure in a model that ensures regular cash flow throughout the year, it will work well for your business. And you will have ample money at your disposal when the season arrives.
Tenet 2: Prepare Your Employees Appropriately
The busy season for your business requires everyone to put their best foot forward. And to make sure that this happens, you need to equip your employees with the best training you can offer for handing the rush.
Your employees need to be the best when it comes to excellent, efficient and effective customer service. And they also need to support every area of the business pressurized by the demands of the consumers to create a supportive network.
Another thing that every seasonal business owner needs to understand is that the nature of their organization may make it difficult to get the employees back on track once the season, and the business, arrives.
Don’t let the laze of the non-seasonal months get on to your employees. It’s best to complete the necessary preparatory tasks such as planning the checks of the inventory during these months. It will keep employees alert and active, and prepared.
Tenet 3: Create Opportunities for Your Business Smartly
If the profits from the peak season aren’t enough to sustain you for long, it is time you explore your choices. One intelligent tactic is to channelize your resources into a complementary stream to make use of them during the off seasons.
Let’s take an aforementioned example to illustrate the point. Suppose you earn good profits from renting out vacation cabins in the mountains. But your earnings are confined to the summer months.
What do you do to expand the reach of your business? Why not transform the summer cabins into ski shacks for the winter months? You make use of the same property, but open a new avenue to profit from it with this strategy.
But before you decide to make your seasonal business work for your advantage during the off season, you need to make sure that it doesn’t hamper your primary profit-making venture. Otherwise, it will lead to disastrous consequences.
You need not confine your business ideas just because it is seasonal.
You have the opportunity to make it work effectively for you throughout the year. Just make sure you pay attention to the small details that matter. And once you have done this, it isn’t much difficult to become a success.
