Summer. It’s a time when a lot of service business owners are bracing to be extremely busy. You cancel your plans, you have an “all hands on deck” mentality, and you make sure your team is ready.
In my opinion, this thinking is broken. You’re so focused on the busyness that you’re missing out on a key opportunity. In this blog post, I want to help you change your thinking so that your BUSY summer becomes a record-breaking summer for you and leads to a higher-performing business.
Mindset Change
It starts with a simple mindset change. Instead of bracing for a busy summer and warning your team that the summer will be busy, instead get excited about the summer and get your team excited about it and start thinking about how you can build your business so it’s ready for anything.
Think 2 and even 3 seasons ahead; make strategic moves NOW, even before summer comes, in order to springboard business growth off of this summer and make future seasons even bigger!
Here Are 5 Decisions You Need To Make BEFORE Summer For An Amazing Summer And A New Level In Business
#1. Marketing: If you already know you’re going to be busy, you may have “turned off” your marketing, just to make sure you keep up with the calls that are coming in. But instead of turning off your marketing, why not rethink your marketing so that you market in the summer for an even busier summer but ALSO an amazing fall and winter? What kind of marketing can you do during the summer to make the fall and winter extremely busy for you?
#2. Service: When it’s busy, the service you provide your customers can suffer because your employees feel the pressure to move on rather than spending time with your customers. But your competitors are doing exactly the same thing. If you want deep, long-lasting, and profitable relationships with your customers, think about how you can level up your service this summer to really stand out. Train your team to take the time necessary and build enough capacity into your calls so that your employees know they have the ability to spend some extra time with customers.
#3. Recruiting: Is it possible to use the busy season to recruit more employees? The summer might be a great time to bring on new staff even to help around the office and in the warehouse, to free up your experts so they can be on the road that much more. How can you use this busy season to help you recruit more employees?
#4. Profit: It’s busy in the summer and that means the income starts rolling in, too. But just because you’re making more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making more profit, since your costs are probably higher too. But there are ways to make more profit now and in the future: make sure you collect the names and contact information of your customers so you can market to them in the fall and winter. And, get your employees promoting your membership plans or pre-selling services for the upcoming season so you can generate more revenue (and profit!) this summer.
#5. New strategies: I’m only scratching the surface of what you can do in your business to take advantage of the summer season. Try new strategies and take the time right now to get educated on new ways that you can grow—from new products and services to new tradelines to referral arrangements and more.
Summary
A lot of businesses approach the summer season with anxiety, telling employees to brace themselves for the busyness. But a better approach is to ask, “How can we make this busy season even better and make it the new benchmark of success that every season should be like?”
